Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Alex | Email Tina 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 Payne After 12 straight years of larger-than-life personalities in the Oval Office, JOE BIDEN is testing the proposition that less can be more there. The results have been mixed. On Thursday, the president helped finalize a bipartisan agreement on an infrastructure deal. It’s difficult to call it a win on the specifics. Biden had proposed a $2 trillion package and was adamant that climate be a big component of it. He settled for roughly $570 billion in new spending, moved substantially lower on climate, and left a lot dangling on the possibility he could secure more in a subsequent Democrats-only deal passed through budget reconciliation. It was, however, a win on style points—at least for a few fleeting hours. Biden didn’t resort to browbeating. He didn’t attempt some Sorkin-esque stemwinder of a speech to win over skeptical senators. Instead, a patient, low-profile approach to negotiations did the trick; right up until Republicans accused him of changing the terms by conditioning it all on the passage of trillions more in spending via reconciliation. All of which is not to say that Biden found the key to unifying the parties. Days earlier, that same approach failed him. The Democratic Party’s main vehicle for a sweeping overhaul of election and voting laws was undone by a Republican filibuster this week. And while the White House insists that Biden has put political elbow grease into the passage of that bill — known as S1 — the president’s critics didn’t see it that way. They chastised him for his soft touch, wondered how he could not have given a rip-roaring denunciation of Republicans the day of the vote, and suggested he should have held a live debate with the bill’s critics. The divergent fates of election reform and infrastructure repair could be interpreted in a variety of ways. A simple one is that it’s just easier to get agreement on spending gobs of money on parochial interests than changing voting laws. But the lessons here also pertain to the power of the presidency; or, rather, the limits of that power. The president who derives his influence from browbeating, arm-twisting and delivering Sorkin-like drama is a myth. It exists only in activists’ (and screenwriters) fantasies, sporadically reemerging as frustrations with the political system’s rigidities mount. The desire for it became so predominant during the Obama era that the term Green Lanternism was coined to describe it. The academic who came up with the name — BRENDAN NYHAN , a poli sci professor at the country’s crown jewel of academia, and one of its finest small town treasures, Dartmouth — said we are entering a redux. “There are a lot of liberals who want things that are impossible given the state of institutions we have in this country,” said Nyhan. “Activists still have this notion that Joe Biden can force JOE MANCHIN to do what he wants either through persuasion or inflicting political pain. But that never made sense to me. Attacking Joe Manchin doesn’t hurt him in West Virginia. It helps him.” Nyhan said the current bout of Green Lanternism is not quite the same as, say, eight years ago; that more progressives understand that the structures of government (the filibuster, gerrymandered districts, and so on) are what impedes liberal progress, not the lack of willpower from the Oval Office. That seemed particularly true today, as Republicans threatened to sink the measures agreed upon by the two parties if Democrats pressed the majority of the other initiatives through a 50-vote threshold. Biden allies say the president often simply isn’t willing to play this game. He keeps away from the center of political controversies. Perhaps coincidentally, but certainly symbolically, he whispers into the microphone when emphasizing his points — as if physically trying to bring down the volume level of the rhetoric. “I think he subscribes to the notion that the founders of this Republic were not only concerned about what we did, but how we did things. And sometimes the second part of that equation gets lost on people,” said a former Senate colleague and longtime Biden confidant. But there may be another factor at play that benefited Biden too, Nyhan posited. He benefits from the diminished expectations of his political abilities. “There is a generation cohort of liberals who still have a West Wing mindset when it comes to presidential success and the model for achieving it,” he said. “This may be where Biden benefits. There is no West Wing framework in which he fits.” With reporting by Natasha Korecki SCOOP: KAMALA HARRIS’s head of digital strategy, RAJAN KAUR, is leaving the VP’s office, according to two people familiar with the move. It is at least the third departure from Harris’s office reported the past two days. ANNIE KARNI and KATIE ROGERS reported yesterday that Harris’s director of advance and deputy director of advance are also leaving. A spokesperson for the vice president declined to comment. FLASHBACK: Harris assistant press secretary RACHEL PALERMO welcoming Kaur to Twitter last month. | 
