Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from Allie Bice. Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Alex President JOE BIDEN’s team may have been earnest and well-intentioned. But a documentary crew that got extensive access to key members portrays a White House that encountered setbacks in part because of its hubris. That is a central takeaway from the upcoming HBO program “ Year One: A Political Odyssey ” which is premiering Wednesday and features several interviews with Biden’s Covid-19 and national security teams over the course of 2021. West Wing Playbook was granted an early preview of the film that begins with the raging pandemic and a militarized Washington at the outset of Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration, just days after the attack on the Capitol. Some staff had to load on to buses at the National Zoo in order to arrive at the White House the first day and watched the inaugural address on their phones. National Security Adviser JAKE SULLIVAN watched the ceremony from the Situation Room to help monitor for violence. After that ominous beginning, however, the film shows how Biden’s top officials quickly began to brim with confidence, having rolled out a mass Covid vaccination campaign ahead of expectations. “The president had set a goal for us of 100 million shots in 100 days. We did 100 million shots in 58 days,” Biden’s then-Covid “czar” JEFF ZIENTS tells the filmmakers. It was a premature celebration, one that the filmmakers capture in detail as top White House aides begin to realize they miscalculated. After featuring Biden’s July Fourth remarks from his “Independence from Covid-19” event, the documentary zeroes in on the Delta variant spreading across the country, spreading among even those who had been vaccinated. “We didn’t have a sense, clearly, of the impact of new variants,” then-press secretary JEN PSAKI concedes. “It became clear that we were going to be dealing with much higher case counts than we thought,” notes ANDY SLAVITT, a top official on the Covid team. “It took this sort of very clean story of vaccinated and unvaccinated and it said: vaccinated, yes, but with an asterisk.” The documentary’s director, JOHN MAGGIO, told West Wing Playbook that “everybody got caught off guard [by Delta] — Zients, Slavitt, they all were.” But the film isn’t just about pandemic-era missteps. It’s about a White House that comes to realize that good intentions sometimes aren’t sufficient to match real world challenges. In the film, Secretary of State TONY BLINKEN candidly admits to a major miscalculation in organizing the exit from Afghanistan. “I believed strongly that we were going to have a robust embassy presence in Kabul certainly through the year [2021], well into the next year,” he says. “Everything that we planned and did was based on that assumption.” Maggio said he first got access to Blinken and the State Department and then gradually worked his way out from there. The documentary features interviews with chief of staff RON KLAIN, Defense Secretary LLOYD AUSTIN, climate envoy JOHN KERRY, and other top officials along with New York Times reporter DAVID SANGER, who also produced the film. Though the president and the vice president’s office turned down the crew’s requests to interview their principals, the HBO documentary does give a window into how the psyche of a White House can change. Maggio noted that “by the end of the summer, it just felt like the wheels were coming off… Suddenly they became the gang that couldn't shoot straight.” Still, Maggio concludes that the Biden team learned from Afghanistan. As a result, they became hyper-vigilant as Russia began amassing forces on the border of Ukraine. “That was kind of their saving grace for ‘Year One,’” he said. Whether that portends future breakthroughs in other venues is anyone’s guess, Maggio said. “The sort of urbane kind of nature of this administration, they're very worldly – Is that the best approach? I don't know. I think it's going to bear itself out. It will be interesting to see what happens.” MESSAGE US — Are you ALEX HASKELL, the chief of staff in the office of legislative affairs? We want to hear from you! And we’ll keep you anonymous. Email us at westwingtips@politico.com .
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