RON KLAIN AND THE DEMISE OF MODERATE DEMOCRATS:
But the main conclusion to draw from Klain’s time as chief of staff is that his decisions and actions demonstrate the way the Democratic Party establishment has undergone a fundamental shift since the 1980s and 1990s. Someone with Klain’s background might have been expected to despise his party’s radicals and their ideological obsessions with climate change, open borders, and intersectional myths about race. But as chief of staff, he wound up leaving little daylight between the White House and the rhetoric of the congressional “Squad” and other hardcore progressives.
Rather than being the expression of the normalcy and moderation of the Democratic Party that had governed successfully during the Clinton presidency, Biden and Klain’s White House signaled the death of that wing of their party. After BLM and Jan. 6, there was no resisting the “resistance” even if they had wished to do so. Klain’s successor, Jeff Zients, another veteran establishmentarian, is unlikely to think differently. If this was his last government job, Klain’s career may have epitomized the career path of a Democratic insider, but it also demonstrated that the era of Democratic moderates is over. Instead of cooling down political rhetoric, Klain fueled the continuing decline of public discourse into bitter vituperation. Rather than healing the country’s post-Trump and post-pandemic wounds, the Biden administration’s hard-left turn that he helped oversee has made clear that bipartisanship is dead and the era of partisan culture wars is just beginning.
Still though, we’ll always have these show-stopping moments to look back on during President Klain’s time in office:
And from the previous year: White House Christmas message to unvaccinated: You’re looking at a winter of death for yourselves and your families:
From earlier in December of 2021: Biden’s Chief of Staff Can’t Stop Embarrassing Himself On Twitter:
The president’s chief of staff is arguably the most demanding job inside any White House. President Joe Biden’s top staffer, Ron Klain, isn’t making things easier for himself lately with the absurd things he’s posting on Twitter.
Klain is what we can only call a Very Online person. He is constantly tweeting and sharing other people’s posts to his half-million followers in an incessant effort to cheerlead for his boss and the Democratic Party more broadly. While this is the role of any outward-facing political staffer, Klain is taking his shilling so far that he’s now just making embarrassing public statements on the regular.
For example, Klain recently tweeted that “America is back at work” alongside this graph, which shows the opposite.
The Biden staffer boosted the graph hoping to show that the labor force participation rate, the percentage of people working or seeking work, is back to normal after the pandemic. Yet it actually shows that it’s still significantly below pre-pandemic levels, even a year and nine months later. Anyone with eyes can clearly see this.
In actuality, we are 8.2 million jobs below the pre-pandemic trend, according to economist Aaron Sojourner. So much for America being “back at work.”
From August of 2021: White House chief of staff Ron Klain retweets Paul Begala saying Biden’s handling of Afghanistan has been ‘Trumanesque.’
And from July of 2021: The Mark of Klain. “[A]ll in all, things have worked out pretty darn well for Ron Klain. For America? Not so much.”