With help from Allie Bice and Daniel Payne Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. Did someone forward this to you? Subscribe here! Have a tip? Email us at westwingtips@politico.com. RON KLAIN does not run on Dunkin’. There is no Folgers in his cup. “I don't drink coffee (I'm still a TAB drinker),” Biden’s energetic White House chief of staff told the non-profit networking organization TheBridge a few years ago. A source familiar with Klain’s habits confirmed he still doesn’t drink the stuff. Instead, he has long relied on TAB (sometimes written “TaB”), the cult favorite soda once marketed by Coca-Cola as the drink "for beautiful people” because of its low-calorie content. “Let’s call it adoration,” said MOE VELA, who worked with Klain in Vice President AL GORE ’s office and again when Klain became chief of staff to JOE BIDEN during the Obama administration. “You quickly learn that TAB brought him a special joy,” he added. Some of his predecessors were flabbergasted. “I don't know where to begin with this. Are you saying no caffeine or no coffee?” RAHM EMANUEL, a former White House chief of staff himself, asked when informed of Klain’s abstinence. After West Wing Playbook explained that Klain just abstains from coffee — TAB has slightly more caffeine than Diet Coke, though Coca-Cola also made a caffeine-free version — Emanuel responded in a text message that he remembered Klain’s affection for TAB, “because many a can was left on my desk” in the Obama White House. The soft drink, launched in 1963 as Coca-Cola’s first diet soda, saw its popularity ebb after the company debuted Diet Coke in the 1980s. But it had its loyalists — sometimes known as TABaholics — including former Federal Communications Commission Chairman AJIT PAI. “When I think of Tab now, it just feels very evocative of the era when I came of age, in the late 1970s and 1980s, which makes me smile,” Pai wrote in an email to West Wing Playbook. “These days, I'm not a big fan of diet sodas in general, but I'll make an exception for Tab!” Still, Pai wasn’t nearly as devoted to TAB as Klain. Pai said he’d drunk TAB very rarely as an adult and couldn’t “remember the last time I've had it (it's been a few years at least).” Klain, by most accounts, was a prodigious consumer of the diet-soda. So it was exceptionally poor timing for the incoming chief of staff when Coca-Cola announced late last year that it would close TAB’s, errr, tab and permanently cease production. “I have gotten more sympathy emails and texts about this story than the many times that Trump or Pence have attacked me,” Klain tweeted at the time, along with a link to The Wall Street Journal’s scoop on the soda fizzing out. “And honestly, this is definitely a harder blow.” Klain’s affection for TAB dates back at least to the Clinton administration. DEBBIE BENGTSON , who worked as Klain’s executive assistant when he was chief of staff to Gore, recalled that Klain had “a fantastic sense of humor,” she wrote in an email to West Wing Playbook. “So, when he told me he loved Tab, I truly thought he was joking. But, I came to learn he was very serious, and it was indeed his go-to soda. He called it the ‘very best diet drink of them all.’” At some point during the Clinton administration, Bengtson decided to buy Klain a case of TAB for his birthday. But the soda was already getting tough to find in Washington D.C. in the 1990s. Bengtson called several grocery stores, then liquor stores, and finally located a single six-pack at a Capitol Hill liquor store. “The guy who worked there told me he found the lonely six-pack crouched behind tonics and other mixers,” she said. Klain, she recalled, loved the gift. “After that, though, it always surprised me to see him with a TAB because, honestly, I thought I had excavated the very last one in all the metro area,” she wrote. “But, Ron’s like that—he gets things done!” More recently, Klain’s TAB procurement powers seem to have ebbed. Over the course of the Obama administration, colleagues recall that it was becoming harder to find. Now, some Biden campaign and White House aides expressed surprise that Klain loved TAB so much since they hadn’t seen or noticed him drinking it. “I thought TAB was banned like 30 years ago because it gave people cancer,” quipped one. (Fact check: false. While TAB contained saccharin, which was shown in studies in the 1970s to cause cancer in rats, subsequent studies found no clear evidence that it does so in humans.) Coca-Cola said it canceled TAB because it had decided to focus on brands that “prioritize scale” and that would “enable accelerated growth.” (Read: not TAB.) “Here is my question — what is he drinking now that TAB is no longer?” PAT EWING, a deputy chief of staff to Gore who recalled Klain drinking TAB in meetings and with his lunch. “Did he buy a stash by the case?” The answer, according to a person familiar with the matter: Klain has switched to Diet Coke. While Coca-Cola has stopped sending TAB to stores, there are still three places it’s available: the World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta and the company’s stores in Orlando, Fla., and Las Vegas. (It also appears you can buy them from third party sellers on Amazon but buyer beware!) Klain seems to be an outlier in a coffee-friendly White House. Biden is a coffee drinker and he coerced poor JARED BERNSTEIN — now a member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers — into drinking instant coffee as part of his job interview back in 2008. Quelle horreur. National Economic Council director BRIAN DEESE has described himself as a “regular consumer of coffee” who openly fretted about not being able to get a cup when the White House mess closed between 2 and 3 p.m. during the Obama administration. “You want to plan your day to not get caught in the dead zone,” Deese told Time magazine. But Emanuel isn’t worried about Klain’s energy, even with TAB off the shelf. “Let’s just say he does not need any coffee but for the rest of the senior team that’s an open question,” he said. Do you work in the Biden administration? Are you in touch with the White House? Are you ELIZABETH ALEXANDER? We want to hear from you — and we’ll keep you anonymous: westwingtips@politico.com. Or if you want to stay really anonymous send us a tip through SecureDrop, Signal, Telegram, or Whatsapp here. You can also reach Alex and Theo individually. | 
