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Team Biden controls the narrative and other commentary

By Post Editorial Board May 10, 2021 | 5:30pm | Updated

From the left: Team Biden Controls the Narrative

President Donald Trump “called the media the enemy of the people, but all politicians hate the media who cover them,” quips New York magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi. President Biden’s press staffers “still resent the harsh coverage” he got amid the Democratic primaries, and the “spirit of joylessness and bitterness that defined the campaign didn’t go away once they won.” Now the Trump “dynamic” where “the president said one thing while the White House said another . . . persists into the Biden era”: Staff walked the prez’s comments back after Biden broke “with months of linguistic contortions from his administration” by calling the migrant surge a “crisis.” This shows “the unusual degree to which his staff seeks to control the narrative (and often succeeds) by controlling the press and the president himself.” And the “dumb tactics” work: AP told reporters to “avoid” the word “crisis.”

Conservative: Joe’s Border Desperation

The Biden administration has now “twice extended the deadline for federal employees to volunteer for months-long deployments at the US-Mexico border, undermining the White House’s attempts to downplay the recent severity of the migrant crisis,” Amber Athey reports at Spectator USA. Last Friday, word went out that workers have two more weeks, until May 21, to apply “to assist with the influx of unaccompanied migrant children” after the first extension from the initial April 26 deadline.

Libertarian: Unions vs. School Reopenings

The “foot-dragging response to school closings” shows that “students are not the priority but serve as a prop by which district officials and teachers’ unions arm-twist taxpayers for money,” laments Steven Greenhut at Reason. California charters and private schools “have worked tirelessly to get students and teachers back to school,” but public-school teachers delay reopening to “only after officials agree to a laundry list of demands that have little to do with ‘the children.’?” With taxpayers funding “government monopolies regardless of how well they perform,” school districts settled for a “plodding and incompetent” transition to virtual learning, then “essentially blamed the students” for remote failure. “The public-school system is a travesty that does not — and cannot — put students first. The only answer is competition, so that parents and students can take their business elsewhere.”

Progressive: Dems, Beware Labour’s Woes

“Democrats would be wise to look across the Atlantic at what happened to the Labour Party,” John Judis warns at Talking Points Memo. In its 2019 shellacking and more woes in last week’s local elections, the party has hemorrhaged working-class voters. Why? Labour under Tony Blair “cast its lot with the growth of London’s financial sector,” embraced the European Union and “extolled the promise of globalization.” Then new “young and college-educated” activists joined under Jeremy Corbyn, pushing “support for a cultural politics that broke with Labour’s historical commitments to family, community and nation,” even denouncing feminists “that restricted membership in their rape shelters to biological women.” Some hope to copy Joe Biden’s success, but Biden, 78, “reflects an older labor-oriented Democratic party that is being replaced by a party preoccupied with culture and identity.” Dems’ response to Labour’s collapse should be: “It can happen here.”

From the right: The Prez’s Short Leash

At The Hill, Joe Concha finds it “amazing, almost disturbing,” that President Biden, “the leader of the free world,” gets advised not to “speak to reporters” outside controlled settings, as White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki admitted last week. This explains why he only calls on reporters, from “a predetermined list,” who won’t challenge him. And when Biden does take questions, “his answers are often misleading or outright wrong.” US adversaries “are taking note” that Biden’s team has “no confidence in his ability to speak” outside scripted remarks. Yet “if there was ever a time when a president” needed “to be scrutinized, this is certainly it,” given the “trillions upon trillions” in new spending he wants.

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board

https://nypost.com/2021/05/10/team-biden-controls-the-narrative-and-other-commentary/