Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Eli | Email Lauren JOE BIDEN’s allies felt good after former Special Counsel ROBERT HUR’s congressional testimony Tuesday and the release of interview transcripts he had conducted with the president. A day that could have produced damning testimony or political fireworks largely didn’t. But amid that optimism was a lingering concern that the damage done by Hur’s initial report, in which he described Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” may prove hard to erase. At a minimum, it would take time. “The damage can and will be undone, but there’s a big opportunity cost here, right?” said JESSE LEE, a former White House senior adviser. “Biden’s actual agenda, when people hear about it, is very popular. But he doesn’t get to talk about that in the general election campaign. He has to spend the entire month defending himself against some prosecutor’s like, dear diary.” Administration officials had prepared for Hur’s appearance before the House Judiciary Committee to turn into an hours-long litigation of the president’s mental acuity. Instead, the session centered largely on Biden’s possession of classified documents, Hur’s prosecutorial choices and comparisons between Biden and former President DONALD TRUMP. There were difficult moments for the president, including Hur affirming that Biden had lied when saying he did not share classified information with a ghostwriter and the transcript’s revelations that Biden struggled to find the words for “fax machine” or recall which years he was vice president. But Democrats believe the former special counsel took some lumps himself. In particular, they noted that — in contrast to the implication Hur gave in his earlier report — Biden had accurately recalled the day and month of his son BEAU’s death; and that, at one point, Hur had called the president’s recall “photographic.” The problem, White House aides and allies argued, was that the frenzied coverage around the original report overshadowed the more nuanced picture that emerged Tuesday from the full transcript of Biden’s two interviews with Hur — a transcript that the White House pushed to get released. “It’s unfortunate that the actual context and full story of the interview with the president won’t get the level of attention that an explosive politically charged report did,” said a White House official granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive subject. “It’s a byproduct of our current media environment that encourages running toward the flame instead of presenting the full story and context.” Every White House staffer is a media critic at heart. And the Biden crew is no different. They did not think the coverage of Hur’s initial report was grounded, drawing parallels to how the press took former attorney general WILLIAM BARR’s pre-buttal of former Special Counsel ROBERT MUELLER’s report at face value, only for Mueller to dispute it. It was not lost on them that the Hur report led to another public anxiety session among Democrats over the president’s age that they would have loved to have avoided. Days after the Hur report was released, an ABC/Ipsos poll showed that 86 percent of Americans said the president is too old to serve another term — an increase from a September ABC News/ Washington Post poll that found that 74 percent of Americans thought Biden was too old to be reelected. The deluge of media coverage about “President Biden’s mental fitness in the days after the Hur report, that is gonna leave a mark,” said ERIC SCHULTZ, a senior adviser to former President BARACK OBAMA. “There can’t be a whitewash of how the media exploded in the wake of the Hur report.” Since then, Biden has sought to ease concerns about his age by addressing them head-on in a campaign ad and with a notably energetic State of the Union speech. The Hur hearing could have undone some of that work. But the White House evidently felt it didn’t, based on how it reacted. Whereas Biden issued a thunderous public denunciation of Hur the evening after the report was released, the president did not respond at all on Tuesday. Instead, he spent the day meeting with the leadership of the Teamsters’ union and holding a bilateral meeting with the president and prime minister of Poland. Biden was updated on the hearing and “saw a little bit of what went down,” according to IAN SAMS, spokesman for the White House Counsel’s Office. The hope now among some Democrats is that voters’ concerns about Biden’s age are already baked into their perceptions of the president. They may not be alleviated by Tuesday’s testimony or by transcript revelations showing a Biden that most longtime aides recognized: a politician prone to meandering monologues and tangents, more scatterbrained than forgetful. They also may have been cemented long before the Hur report came out. “All the report did in the first place was it validated concerns for people who already had them,” said a Democratic strategist who has viewed private polling on the issue and was granted anonymity to discuss them. “But there was no growth in concerns about that issue six weeks ago when the report came out.” MESSAGE US — Are you ROBERT HUR? We want to hear from you. And we’ll keep you anonymous! 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