Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from Allie Bice and Daniel Lippman. Send tips | Subscribe here| Email Alex | Email Max The White House is partying like it’s the 1990’s. Increasingly, important players in BILL CLINTON’s White House have been or are becoming the most powerful people in JOE BIDEN ’s. Biden has prioritized familiar faces with decades of White House experience to fill his innermost-circle rather than bringing in a new generation of Democratic players. “There’s really no reason a guy like Biden should be going on blind dates,” quipped DOUG SOSNIK, who served with many of Biden’s top aides in the Clinton administration. Sosnik noted that both the Clinton and BARACK OBAMA’ s White House skewed younger than Biden’s — but that wasn’t always a positive. “If you go back to when Clinton first took office, it was a real problem for Clinton because you only had a handful of people who had worked in the White House,” he said. Biden’s closest advisers — chief of staff RON KLAIN, his top deputy BRUCE REED, and presidential counselor STEVE RICHETTI — all had multiple senior roles in the Clinton administration. Biden’s longtime senior advisor MIKE DONILON worked for Clinton’s 1992 campaign. Treasury Secretary JANET YELLEN was the head of Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers. Many of these individuals are Biden lifers. But since his inauguration, Biden has also brought in other longtime Clinton hands with less overt ties to him. GENE SPERLING, Clinton’s National Economic Council director, is now a senior adviser to Biden charged with implementing his signature American Rescue Plan. Biden’s staff secretary, NEERA TANDEN, was a policy adviser for HILLARY CLINTON in her husband’s administration. And most recently, Biden brought in JOHN PODESTA, Clinton’s former chief of staff, to be a senior adviser for clean energy innovation and implementation. The notable exception within Biden’s inner circle is senior adviser ANITA DUNN, who did not work for Bill Clinton, and who worked for BARACK OBAMA in his 2008 campaign against Hillary Clinton. In the 2000 Democratic primary, she was a top aide on BILL BRADLEY’s campaign when he challenged Vice President AL GORE. A White House spokesperson pushed back on the premise of this story. “Every administration employs staff who served in earlier administrations,” said ROBYN PATTERSON . “All of the individuals listed served in the Obama Administration, as well. The President is proud to have built the most diverse White House in American history.” Some administration officials have been frustrated by Biden’s reliance on the so-called Old Guard and believe it has made it difficult to recruit and keep new blood. Podesta’s hire this summer came as a particular surprise since some in the administration and the White House had assumed that ALI ZAIDI would completely own the White House’s climate portfolio after the departure of his boss, GINA McCARTHY. He now has her title of “national climate adviser” but Podesta will also have a significant part of the climate portfolio. Naturally, some Clinton officials view Biden’s preference for Clinton veterans as shrewd, especially given the president’s focus on trying to get things through Congress. “Anyone who worked in the Clinton administration had to deal with a pretty complicated matrix to get anything done with the Republicans in Congress,” said JAKE SIEWERT, who held a number of posts in the Clinton White House including press secretary. “It’s natural for the president, who knows a lot of them from that period, to turn to those folks.” Many of the Clinton veterans Biden has tapped are considered more pragmatists than ideologues. As a result, the Biden administration has taken a different approach from the Clinton administration on issues like trade, debt, and welfare. A spokesperson for Clinton said the former president would “politely take a pass” on talking to West Wing Playbook. Both Clintons have occasionally dipped their toes in the political waters recently. The former president lobbied Sen. JOE MANCHIN (D-W.Va.) on Build Back Better (aka the Inflation Reduction Act) and gave a pep talk to Biden this past May, as POLITICO reported this week. Beyond her new Apple TV show and regular media appearance, Hillary Clinton has spoken privately with Vice President KAMALA HARRIS and will appear with her Friday at the Democratic Party Women’s Leadership Forum Conference, according to an invitation obtained by West Wing Playbook. MESSAGE US — Are you JOHN PODESTA? Email us at westwingtips@politico.com and we may publish your comments.
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