President-elect Joe Biden has chosen longtime Washington operative Ronald A. Klain as White House chief of staff, sending an early signal that he intends to rely heavily on experience, competence and political agility after a Trump presidency that prized flashiness and personality. Klain, 59, has been a senior adviser to Democratic presidents, vice presidents, candidates and senators. His appointment marks a homecoming of sorts, since Klain served in the late 1980s as a top aide to Biden when he was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and ran Biden’s office when he first became vice president. “Ron has been invaluable to me over the many years that we have worked together, including as we rescued the American economy from one of the worst downturns in our history in 2009 and later overcame a daunting public health emergency in 2014,” Biden said in a statement. “His deep, varied experience and capacity to work with people all across the political spectrum is precisely what I need in a White House chief of staff as we confront this moment of crisis and bring our country together again.” A strategist with a legal mind and political ear, Klain is the sort of behind-the-scenes Washington hand more common in decades past, an operative who has managed everything from an Ebola outbreak to candidate debates to judicial confirmations. “This town is brimming with smart people and high school valedictorians,” said Jared Bernstein, an economic adviser to Biden when he was vice president. “Ron brings something extra to the table, which is an ability to quickly process complex, conflicting streams of information and zero in on the optimal solution.” Often called the second-hardest gig in Washington, the White House chief of staff holds what is traditionally the most important unelected position in government not subject to a Senate confirmation — the person who must wake the president in a crisis and decide who gets to be in the room to shape his views. The job has often gone to the most talented advisers in both parties — people such as Republican James Baker and Democrat Leon Panetta. Under President Trump, however, the role of the chief of staff has shifted, with the position falling to officials with strained relations and limited sway with Trump. Bucking convention, Trump’s son-in-law, White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, established an independent locus of power inside the West Wing. Choosing Klain reflects Biden’s plan to move beyond that chaos-driven presidency. The internal White House structure probably will revert to form, with a single manager in charge surrounded by senior officials who also have direct relationships with the president. Mike Donilon, who helped write Biden’s campaign strategy, and Steve Ricchetti, the campaign chairman, are well positioned to land influential positions inside the White House, according to people with knowledge of the internal dynamics who spoke on the condition of anonymity to recount private conversations. Other top campaign advisers, including Anita Dunn, a former White House communications director, and her husband, former White House counsel Bob Bauer, are expected to stay out of government this time around. Many in Biden’s orbit have long seen Klain as the most obvious pick for chief of staff after more than 30 years of background roles. After a falling-out with Biden’s team when he offered early support to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid, Klain has worked his way back into the upper echelons of Biden’s trusted circle. He consulted with Biden on general strategy even before the former vice president announced his presidential campaign last year, and since August he has served as an unpaid senior adviser to the campaign and led Biden’s extensive debate preparation. “He is the logical choice and brings the complete package — universally acknowledged ability, a broad range of experience, chemistry with the president-elect — and he is a strategic thinker that brings results,” said Pete Rouse, who was a top aide to President Barack Obama. At times Klain appears to have worked with every Democratic leader of the past three decades. As counsel to the Judiciary Committee, Klain advised then-Sen. Biden during Clarence Thomas’s volatile Supreme Court confirmation hearings. He worked in the Bill Clinton White House to confirm Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court, served as chief of staff to Attorney General Janet Reno and was a top policy aide to Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.). Klain also served as chief of staff to Vice President Al Gore and led Gore’s legal efforts to force a recount of Florida ballots after the 2000 election; actor Kevin Spacey played him in the 2008 movie “Recount.” “People frequently tell me that I should ‘get over’ the 2000 election and the recount,” Klain tweeted in 2019. “I haven’t, and I don’t think I ever will.” Along the way, Klain has developed a specialized role as the Democrats’ preeminent coach for presidential debates. He worked on debate preparations for Bill Clinton in 1992 and Gore in 2000, and he has led the debate prep for every Democratic nominee since — John F. Kerry, Obama, Hillary Clinton and Biden. Klain’s debate rules for candidates, versions of which long ago became public, have been a mainstay of both party’s strategies for these presidential matchups. “Write your ‘dream’ post-debate headline,” one bullet point says. “Dress so no one will talk about it,” says another. “A stumble, fumble, or gaffe can cost you a debate, right up to the last second,” he wrote in one memo that became public. “But while you can lose a debate at any point, you can only win a debate in the first twenty minutes.” But it is Klain’s experience battling both a recession and a pandemic that could come most quickly into play as Biden confronts the nation’s crises. “He knows Biden and he is loyal to Biden, and he absolutely has Biden’s trust,” Dunn said. “There is no one who works harder than Ron, whether it is on a debate book or covid policy.” As Biden’s vice-presidential chief of staff, Klain oversaw the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a stimulus package that helped ward off a deeper recession after the 2008 economic collapse. Klain was considered for White House chief of staff during Obama’s second term. That job ultimately went to Denis McDonough, a longtime Obama policy adviser, after Klain withdrew from consideration for personal reasons. But he returned to the White House to become the point man for the administration’s response to the Ebola outbreak, which has now made him one of the Democratic Party’s go-to experts for responding to the coronavirus. [Klain: ‘Lockdown vs. reopening’ is a flawed debate] “It’s hard to prove a counterfactual, but I believe that Ron Klain is the reason we did not have an Ebola epidemic in the United States,” said Valerie Jarrett, a former senior adviser to Obama. “He is well respected by all the people with whom I have worked.”
Biden to Name Richmond, Ricchetti and O'Malley Dillon to Key Staff Jobs https://nyti.ms/2ILUyAJ
Biden to Name Campaign Manager, Congressional Ally and Close Friend to Key Staff Jobs
The appointments of Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Representative Cedric Richmond and Steve Ricchetti suggest the importance that the president-elect is placing on surrounding himself with people he trusts.
WASHINGTON — President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. will formally announce key members of his White House staff on Tuesday, naming Representative Cedric L. Richmond of Louisiana to oversee public outreach and installing Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, who managed his presidential campaign, as a deputy chief of staff, a person familiar with the transition said.
Mr. Biden will also announce that Steve Ricchetti, a longtime confidant, will serve in the White House as a counselor to the president. All three will most likely have offices down the hall from the Oval Office, making them among the most senior aides in the West Wing.
Mr. Richmond will inherit a job once held by Valerie Jarrett in the Obama administration. Kellyanne Conway was President Trump’s counselor, the job that Mr. Ricchetti will take. And Ms. O’Malley Dillon will probably oversee White House operations for Mr. Biden.
A spokesman for the transition declined to comment. A person familiar with the transition planning said the three appointments would be announced along with other members of the president-elect’s staff.
Decisions about cabinet secretaries remain several weeks away, according to people close to Mr. Biden, who has spent several days during the past week in closed-door discussions with advisers about the challenge of winning confirmation fights if the Senate remains in Republican control next year.
By contrast, White House staff positions do not require Senate confirmation, leaving the president-elect wide latitude in selecting his West Wing advisers.
The announcements come as Mr. Biden moves quickly to establish his governing agenda and the team he will need to put it into effect once he takes office. The president-elect is under pressure to fill those jobs with people of diverse ethnic and ideological backgrounds, making good on promises he made during his campaign.
But the appointments of Mr. Richmond, Ms. O’Malley Dillon and Mr. Ricchetti — all loyal lieutenants to Mr. Biden — suggest the importance that he is also placing on surrounding himself with people whose advice he implicitly trusts.
Mr. Richmond, a Democrat whose district includes most of New Orleans, has scheduled a news conference for Tuesday where he is expected to announce he is leaving Congress. In a brief phone call on Monday night, he laughingly declined to confirm that he was joining Mr. Biden’s staff but acknowledged that he would discuss his “future” on Tuesday.
Mr. Richmond was formerly the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, and he has a close relationship with Representative James E. Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina, whose endorsement in February helped revive Mr. Biden’s campaign. Mr. Richmond’s district is safely Democratic, and his departure from Congress is unlikely to cost the party another seat after an election where their majority was weakened.
Mr. Richmond is likely to have broad responsibilities in his senior role and will continue to interact with Congress, according to people familiar with the transition. Others said they expected him to serve as one of the people most willing to give the new president frank and candid advice behind closed doors.
Ms. O’Malley Dillon, a veteran of former President Barack Obama’s campaigns, has been credited with steering Mr. Biden’s presidential bid through the difficulties of the coronavirus pandemic and the challenge of running against an unpredictable rival like Mr. Trump. Her appointment was reported earlier by NBC News.
She assumed the role of campaign manager in mid-March, just as the severity of the coronavirus outbreak was becoming clear to many Americans. Two days after she was named to the role, Biden campaign offices around the country shut down. She learned to remotely navigate the team factions and transformed a shoestring primary operation into a general election organization.
Ms. O’Malley Dillon’s team faced criticism and second-guessing over the light footprint Mr. Biden’s campaign maintained in key battleground states during the pandemic, and throughout the campaign there were tensions between some of the earliest Biden aides and those she brought in as she built the team.
But she was respected inside the campaign for streamlining and organizing what had been a small and underfunded operation, and her expected appointment is a clear sign of the degree to which she is trusted by the president-elect.
Mr. Ricchetti is a close adviser and longtime lobbyist who has been by Mr. Biden’s side for years. He lobbied for the pharmaceutical industry and served as Mr. Biden’s chief of staff when he was the vice president.
As one of Mr. Biden’s most trusted advisers and a longtime member of his tight-knit inner circle, Mr. Ricchetti is expected to have a broad portfolio and a senior role within the administration. During the campaign, he maintained deep relationships across Capitol Hill and in the donor community, sometimes serving as a kind of gatekeeper to the campaign for Democratic heavyweights.
Mr. Biden is likely to move quickly on other key White House jobs as well.
He still has to assemble a communications team, including a press secretary, who will often serve as the public face of the administration. Among the possible candidates for that job is Symone Sanders, who has served as one of his top communications advisers during the campaign.
The president-elect will also have to choose a White House counsel, a key job in an era of divided government, when members of the other party often engage in legal clashes with the president. Dana Remus, who worked in the counsel’s office during Mr. Obama’s tenure, was the chief lawyer for Mr. Biden’s campaign.
And Mr. Biden will need to choose aides to oversee national security, homeland security and economics in his White House. Announcements on some of those positions could also come as soon as Tuesday.
Pranshu Verma and Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting.
Michael D. Shear is a White House correspondent. He previously worked at The Washington Post and was a member of their Pulitzer Prize-winning team that covered the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007. @shearm
Katie Glueck is a national politics reporter at The New York Times, where she covers the 2020 presidential campaign. She previously covered politics for McClatchy’s Washington bureau and for Politico. @katieglueck
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
"He still has to assemble a communications team, including a press secretary, who will often serve as the public face of the administration. Among the possible candidates for that job is Symone Sanders, who has served as one of his top communications advisers during the campaign."
I'm interested in this one and I hope to see reality, respect and some dignity restored to the whole process. That shouldn't be a high bar.
"He still has to assemble a communications team, including a press secretary, who will often serve as the public face of the administration. Among the possible candidates for that job is Symone Sanders, who has served as one of his top communications advisers during the campaign."
I'm interested in this one and I hope to see reality, respect and some dignity restored to the whole process. That shouldn't be a high bar.
If you’ve watched any of Sleepy Woke Joe Basement Biden’s press conferences or taking questions from reporters, you’re already getting that. Sleepy Woke Joe knows his policy and the challenges and can speak intelligently to and of them. Refreshing actually not to sit through a complete BS session.
"He still has to assemble a communications team, including a press secretary, who will often serve as the public face of the administration. Among the possible candidates for that job is Symone Sanders, who has served as one of his top communications advisers during the campaign."
I'm interested in this one and I hope to see reality, respect and some dignity restored to the whole process. That shouldn't be a high bar.
I've watched/heard her on CNN many times and she's good.
Speaking of Press Secretary... That Kayleigh McEnany is a sharp tack, she makes Spicer and Huckabee look like utter fools. I worry about her, she could be a dangerous force in politics in the future...
Speaking of Press Secretary... That Kayleigh McEnany is a sharp tack, she makes Spicer and Huckabee look like utter fools. I worry about her, she could be a dangerous force in politics in the future...
You're giving me hope. I haven't seen her so I'm looking forward to it, thank you. I have enjoyed the sanity of P-E Biden taking questions in the times that's happened too.
You're giving me hope. I haven't seen her so I'm looking forward to it, thank you. I have enjoyed the sanity of P-E Biden taking questions in the times that's happened too.
he brought soul eaters liar in chief onto this thread...
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
"He still has to assemble a communications team, including a press secretary, who will often serve as the public face of the administration. Among the possible candidates for that job is Symone Sanders, who has served as one of his top communications advisers during the campaign."
I'm interested in this one and I hope to see reality, respect and some dignity restored to the whole process. That shouldn't be a high bar.
I've watched/heard her on CNN many times and she's good.
Yes she seems like a no nonsense type of person. They might have to tell her to back off a bit.
Remember the Thomas Nine !! (10/02/2018) The Golden Age is 2 months away. And guess what….. you’re gonna love it! (teskeinc 11.19.24)
1998: Noblesville; 2003: Noblesville; 2009: EV Nashville, Chicago, Chicago 2010: St Louis, Columbus, Noblesville; 2011: EV Chicago, East Troy, East Troy 2013: London ON, Wrigley; 2014: Cincy, St Louis, Moline (NO CODE) 2016: Lexington, Wrigley #1; 2018: Wrigley, Wrigley, Boston, Boston 2020: Oakland, Oakland:2021: EV Ohana, Ohana, Ohana, Ohana 2022: Oakland, Oakland, Nashville, Louisville; 2023: Chicago, Chicago, Noblesville 2024: Noblesville, Wrigley, Wrigley, Ohana, Ohana
Speaking of Press Secretary... That Kayleigh McEnany is a sharp tack, she makes Spicer and Huckabee look like utter fools. I worry about her, she could be a dangerous force in politics in the future...
She certainly makes the art of defending bullshit look effortless. No question she has been and could be dangerous in the future.
Biden signals shift from Trump with national security picks
By MATTHEW LEE
51 mins ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Joe Biden is moving to fill out his national security team with a raft of appointments to top positions that signal his intent to repudiate the Trump administration’s “America First” doctrine.
The six picks announced on Monday, almost all of them alumni of the Obama administration, represent a fundamental shift away from President Donald Trump’s policies and personnel selections. They also mark a return to a more traditional approach to America’s relations with the rest of the world and reflect Biden’s campaign promises to have his Cabinet reflect the diversity of the American population.
In choosing foreign policy veterans, Biden is seeking to upend Trump’s war on the so-called “deep state” that saw an exodus of career officials from government. He will nominate his longtime adviser Antony Blinken to be secretary of state, lawyer Alejandro Mayorkas to be homeland security secretary, Linda Thomas-Greenfield to be ambassador to the United Nations, Jake Sullivan to be his national security adviser, Avril Haines to be Sullivan's deputy, and former Secretary of State John Kerry to be his climate change envoy.
The choices also suggest Biden intends to make good on campaign promises to have his Cabinet reflect the diversity of the American population with Greenfield, a Black woman, at the helm of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations and Mayorkas, a Cuban-American lawyer who will be the first Latino to lead Homeland Security.
They “are experienced, crisis-tested leaders who are ready to hit the ground running on day one,” the transition said in a statement. “These officials will start working immediately to rebuild our institutions, renew and reimagine American leadership to keep Americans safe at home and abroad, and address the defining challenges of our time — from infectious disease, to terrorism, nuclear proliferation, cyber threats, and climate change.”
In making the announcements, Biden moved forward with plans to fill out his government even as Trump refuses to concede defeat in the Nov. 3 election, has pursued baseless legal challenges in several key states and has worked to stymie the transition process.
The stakes of a smooth transition are especially high this year because Biden will take office amid the worst pandemic in more than a century, which will likely require a full government response to contain.
Perhaps the best known of the bunch is Kerry, who made climate change one of his top priorities while serving as Obama's secretary of state.
“America will soon have a government that treats the climate crisis as the urgent national security threat it is,” Kerry said. “I’m proud to partner with the president-elect, our allies, and the young leaders of the climate movement to take on this crisis as the president’s climate envoy.”
Sullivan, who at 43 will be one of the youngest national security advisers in history, was a top aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton before becoming then-Vice President Biden's national security adviser. He said the president-elect had “taught me what it takes to safeguard our national security at the highest levels of our government.”
“Now, he has asked me to serve as his national security adviser,” Sullivan said. “In service, I will do everything in my power to keep our country safe.”
The posts to be held by Kerry, Sullivan and Haines do not require Senate confirmation.
Blinken, 58, served as deputy secretary of state and deputy national security adviser during the Obama administration and has close ties with Biden. If nominated and confirmed, he would be a leading force in the incoming administration’s bid to reframe the U.S. relationship with the rest of the world after four years in which President Donald Trump questioned longtime alliances.
Blinken recently participated in a national security briefing with Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and has weighed in publicly on notable foreign policy issues in Egypt and Ethiopia.
Blinken would inherit a deeply demoralized and depleted career workforce at the State Department. Trump’s two secretaries of state, Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo, offered weak resistance to the administration’s attempts to gut the agency, which were thwarted only by congressional intervention.
Although the department escaped massive proposed cuts of more than 30% in its budget for three consecutive years, it has seen a significant number of departures from its senior and rising mid-level ranks, from which many diplomats have opted to retire or leave the foreign service given limited prospects for advancements under an administration that they believe does not value their expertise.
A graduate of Harvard University and Columbia Law School and a longtime Democratic foreign policy presence, Blinken has aligned himself with numerous former senior national security officials who have called for a major reinvestment in American diplomacy and renewed emphasis on global engagement.
“Democracy is in retreat around the world, and unfortunately it’s also in retreat at home because of the president taking a two-by-four to its institutions, its values and its people every day," Blinken told The Associated Press in September. "Our friends know that Joe Biden knows who they are. So do our adversaries. That difference would be felt on day one.”
Blinken served on the National Security Council during the Clinton administration before becoming staff director for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Biden was chair of the panel. In the early years of the Obama administration, Blinken returned to the NSC and was then-Vice President Biden’s national security adviser before he moved to the State Department to serve as deputy to Secretary of State John Kerry.
Biden has pledged to build the most diverse government in modern history, and he and his team often speak about their desire for his administration to reflect America. He is being watched to see whether he will make history by nominating the first woman to lead the Pentagon, the Treasury Department or the Department of Veterans Affairs or the first African American at the top of the Defense Department, the Interior Department or the Treasury Department.
Ron Klain, Biden’s incoming chief of staff, said Sunday the Trump administration’s refusal to clear the way for Biden’s team to have access to key information about agencies and federal dollars for the transition is taking its toll on planning, including the Cabinet selection process. Trump’s General Services Administration has yet to acknowledge that Biden won the election — a determination that would remove those roadblocks.
“We’re not in a position to get background checks on Cabinet nominees. And so there are definite impacts. Those impacts escalate every day,” Klain told ABC’s “This Week.”
__
Associated Press writers Julie Pace in Washington, Alexandra Jaffe in Wilmington, Delaware, and Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed to this report.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Thick
packets have been delivered regularly to President-elect Joe Biden’s
Wilmington, Del., home, providing meticulous details on each potential
Cabinet member’s strengths, weaknesses and possible areas of conflict.
Biden has been conducting virtual interviews with final candidates,
focusing on their values and life stories nearly as much as their
approach to the departments they would lead.
He
has made Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris perhaps his closest
partner in the Cabinet-selection effort; she has interviewed each
candidate separately and traded notes with Biden afterward in what
people close to the transition say has been an important step in
deepening their working relationship.
Biden’s
transition — which began months before the election results were known —
is providing the first portrait, if one largely conducted behind the
scenes, of his style as a manager and decision-maker in chief.
From
the outside, advocates, groups and members of Congress can find his
process cryptic and unpredictable as they attempt to discern which
directions Biden and his small core of advisers are leaning, only to
find out that he has abruptly switched course. Some nominations have
been handled much more quickly than expected, while other decisions have
lingered, creating some frustration even among allies. Proponents of
demographic and ideological diversity have complained that he has vested too much power in more-moderate White officials like himself.
But
Biden, in what was a defining feature of his campaign, has largely
shrugged off the criticism, confident in his own approach to what he
sees as a gut-check decision-making process. Lately, he has become more
animated in defending some of the choices that his internal
deliberations have yielded, urging those on the outside to take his full
Cabinet into consideration.
“This
Cabinet will be the most representative of any Cabinet in American
history,” Biden said Wednesday while introducing Pete Buttigieg, who would be the first openly gay Cabinet secretary, as his nominee to run the Transportation Department. “We’ll have a Cabinet of barrier breakers, a Cabinet of firsts.”
President-elect
Joe Biden has chosen Pete Buttigieg, a former rival for the Democratic
presidential nomination, to lead the U.S. Transportation Department.
(Reuters)
The
formation of the Biden Cabinet began much earlier and has been far more
comprehensively planned than previously known, according to multiple
people close to the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity to
discuss internal deliberations.
Biden
instructed transition officials months ago that he wanted a range of
options for jobs available in his administration. By Election Day, the
transition had built a database of 9,000 potential administration hires.
Some 2,500 had already been vetted — half of whom were people of color
and more than half of whom were women. That database now has more than
45,000 entries.
Inside the transition, officials say they have tried to exceed the Rooney Rule
— the NFL requirement that teams interview at least one minority
candidate for every head coaching and high-level job — so that more
would have an opportunity to be considered, according to several people
involved with the transition. That has not stopped criticism of Biden’s
eventual selections, particularly for the highest-profile roles.
Biden prefers to work from paper: His transition team has so farsent him more than 130 detailed background memos on the candidates.
“The
Biden transition team is the most-organized, best-resourced and
most-effective transition team ever,” said David Marchick, director of
the nonpartisan Center for Presidential Transition, who has worked for
months with Trump and Biden transition officials. “Future transition
teams, Republican and Democratic, will be studying their model. They’re
just wickedly organized.”
Four
years ago, President Trump’s transition provided an early indication of
how Trump would conduct his presidency. Potential nominees were paraded
into Trump Tower in New York or to his golf course in Bedminster, N.J.,
to shake hands before television cameras. Trump and Mitt Romney, then a
possible secretary of state, dined on frog legs at Jean-Georges in
Manhattan.
Chris Christie, then governor of New Jersey, had set up a vetting process,
a detailed schedule and 30 volumes of transition documents in the
months before the election, only to get pushed out along with his plans
just days after Trump’s victory. In many cases, Trump, a relative
political newcomer, settled on nominees with whom he had little
relationship but whom he thought looked the part.
In
part because of health protocols, but also by design, Biden’s opening
efforts to form his administration could not be more different.
During
his interactions with potential Cabinet members, which have been mostly
virtual until the formal announcements, he is rarely confrontational,
and more often casually breaks the ice. During a video call with
homeland security candidate Alejandro Mayorkas, the former Obama
administration official stumbled over how to address the
president-elect.
“Just call me Joe,” Biden eventually said, by Mayorkas’s account.
While
Harris’s role is still undefined and her imprint on the choices of the
nominees is so far unapparent, she has been involved in almost every
discussion as Biden makes decisions on his administration, according to
people involved in the process.
“She
is the first and last in the room. He is asking her input and her
feedback,” said a person involved in the transition. “That’s the
partnership Biden had with [President Barack] Obama, and as Harris
wanted with Biden. . . . He wants her feedback.”
The
discussions about Cabinet picks and other high-profile posts are kept
to a very small circle, with Harris and Biden joined by incoming White
House chief of staff Ron Klain and just a handful of others. The mood
veers from light banter — with joking laments from Biden about how he
fractured his foot playing with one of his dogs — to the severity of the
economic and health crises his administration will confront.
“He gave us all the following advice: These are tough jobs, make sure you take care of yourself and your family,” Mayorkas said.
Former
senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who helped lead Biden’s similar
vice-presidential search process, said Biden’s management style is one
of “a collaborator.”
“He
likes to talk things out,” Dodd said. “He’s not averseat all to people
expressing alternative views. It’s a very healthy approach. He’s not
insular in any way.”
While Biden has a soft spot for hiring people he knows and has long worked with, he likes to have a wide range of options.
“With
the vice-presidential selection process, I had assumed we’d narrow
candidates down to two or three people,” Dodd said. “Joe wanted to see a
lot. He really wanted more of an opportunity to meet with and talk to
folks. It was like six, seven, eight people. I was sort of surprised.”
The
transition team has examined each agency and looked at how it has been
run historically and which model of leadership was most successful — a
chief executive, or a budget expert, or someone who looked through a
regulatory lens. Candidates were judged by how best they fit the model
the transition team decided on for each job, and those options were
presented to the president-elect.
In
most of his picks, Biden has valued expertise — not necessarily in
particular subject areas but in crisis management. In his view, his
administration is inheriting a multipronged crisis, and a government
workforce that has spent four years being disparaged and downplayed.
That is why many of his appointments have extensive government service,
those close to the decision-making say.
That
instinct, however, has led to some unusual picks that have baffled
outside groups that closely follow each department. Xavier Becerra, the
California attorney general, has little background running a health-care
agency but has been nominated as secretary of health and human
services. Denis McDonough, a former chief of staff to Obama, was chosen
to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs despite never having served
in uniform.
In
both cases, the perception of their general abilities overrode outside
concerns about their expertise in those specific areas.
Biden
has always been one who stews over difficult decisions, letting them
linger and growing agitated with those who try to rush him. Deciding
whether to run for president, including for the most recent of his three
campaigns, was a process that stretched later than advisers wanted, as
he ruminated over the possibilities in front of him before making a
final decision.
His
advisers describe a decision-making and hiring approach that resembles
the playing of an accordion, starting wide and then narrowing — and
then, sometimes suddenly, expanding once more.
Becerra
was initially not a top candidate for HHS, but then suddenly was
filling out paperwork to be vetted late in the process. Retired Army
Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III was not considered a top pick for secretary of
defense until shortly before Biden announced his nomination, causing his
team to scramble to line up support and catching key Democratic
senators off guard.
The
quest for an attorney general nominee appeared to have narrowed in
recent days, but advisers then began floating the name of New York Gov.
Andrew M. Cuomo (D), according to two people close to the process, even
though he has repeatedly denied interest in t he job and Biden has been
primarily focused on a trio of other candidates.
Biden
views his decision-making as taking into account broad amounts of
information and then relying on his gut — and what he considers to be
his forte, homing in on what is politically possible.
“I
measure what happens, how the leaders that I’ve served with based on
. . . whether their judgment about what to do comes from their gut or
their head,” he said earlier this year during a virtual roundtable to
discuss rural issues in Wisconsin.
“I
trust people who start with their gut,” he added. “And they have had a
head bright enough to know what to do about that gut feeling. People who
arrive at it purely from intellectual standpoint, they’re not always
ones that can be counted on to stay through at the very end when it gets
really tough. . . . It starts here in the gut, and it moves to the
head.”
Those who have worked with Biden say he trusts his instincts even when they run counter to the advice he is given.
“He’ll
be the first to tell you, ‘I have better political instincts than all
of you,’ ” said one adviser. “He wants the recommendations. He will hear
varied perspectives, and he wants people to present their case. But at
the end of the day he listens to his gut. If everybody is like, ‘Sir, we
have to go right,’ and he says, ‘My gut says we have to go left,’ he’s
going to give his gut a lot of weight.”
Harris
and Biden, who receive the same packets of information on potential
appointees, ask numerous follow-up questions in their interviews, at
times evaluating two candidates against each other or trying to
determine whether a substantive difference between Biden’s position and
those of the potential nominees is a disqualifier.
Becerra, for example, has long been a proponent of Medicare-for-all,
the health-care plan Biden campaigned against, instead favoring
expansion of Obamacare. But those differences were not deemed a big
enough problem to thwart his nomination.
Most
of Biden’s choices so far are aligned with his views — and, in many
cases, have helped shape his views over the decades. His nominee for
secretary of state, Tony Blinken, is one of Biden’s longest-serving
foreign policy advisers, helping craft lines that Biden still quotes to
this day. Klain, the chief of staff, was Biden’s chief of staff when he
was vice president.
Biden’s
virtual sessions have at times been folksy and conversational, much as
he appears in public. If a dog barks during a presentation, he defuses
the tension by laughing about it. If a staff member’s children walk into
the screen, he’ll engage them in conversation.
“Biden
understands it’s so much bigger than him,” said Rep. Cedric L. Richmond
(D-La.), whom Biden has named as senior adviser and director of the
White House Office of Public Engagement. “He’s not caught up on title
and he’s not caught up on what people call him in the interview. . . .
Trump is erratic and it’s all about Trump. If you do anything to take
attention away from him, he acts like a child. Biden does not seek or
crave attention.”
But, publicly and privately, he does like to talk.
“When
I first sat down with Joe Biden, it was like I had known this man for
10 years. I didn’t know him at all,” said one person who has interviewed
with Biden in the past. “But by the end, he’s offering his cellphone
number and making jokes and talking about family. That’s just who Joe
Biden is.”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
i like the idea of a VP being a part of the team, and not just a figurehead. how much truth there is to the presentation is anyone's guess. it could just be marketing. but i like it. obama/biden did a great job of faking it if it wasn't reality, and it seems this team is the same.
i got the feeling that trump and pence were probably in the same room a handful of times. and only when the cameras were there. you definitely won't see any pictures like this:
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Thick
packets have been delivered regularly to President-elect Joe Biden’s
Wilmington, Del., home, providing meticulous details on each potential
Cabinet member’s strengths, weaknesses and possible areas of conflict.
Biden has been conducting virtual interviews with final candidates,
focusing on their values and life stories nearly as much as their
approach to the departments they would lead.
He
has made Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris perhaps his closest
partner in the Cabinet-selection effort; she has interviewed each
candidate separately and traded notes with Biden afterward in what
people close to the transition say has been an important step in
deepening their working relationship.
Biden’s
transition — which began months before the election results were known —
is providing the first portrait, if one largely conducted behind the
scenes, of his style as a manager and decision-maker in chief.
From
the outside, advocates, groups and members of Congress can find his
process cryptic and unpredictable as they attempt to discern which
directions Biden and his small core of advisers are leaning, only to
find out that he has abruptly switched course. Some nominations have
been handled much more quickly than expected, while other decisions have
lingered, creating some frustration even among allies. Proponents of
demographic and ideological diversity have complained that he has vested too much power in more-moderate White officials like himself.
But
Biden, in what was a defining feature of his campaign, has largely
shrugged off the criticism, confident in his own approach to what he
sees as a gut-check decision-making process. Lately, he has become more
animated in defending some of the choices that his internal
deliberations have yielded, urging those on the outside to take his full
Cabinet into consideration.
“This
Cabinet will be the most representative of any Cabinet in American
history,” Biden said Wednesday while introducing Pete Buttigieg, who would be the first openly gay Cabinet secretary, as his nominee to run the Transportation Department. “We’ll have a Cabinet of barrier breakers, a Cabinet of firsts.”
President-elect
Joe Biden has chosen Pete Buttigieg, a former rival for the Democratic
presidential nomination, to lead the U.S. Transportation Department.
(Reuters)
The
formation of the Biden Cabinet began much earlier and has been far more
comprehensively planned than previously known, according to multiple
people close to the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity to
discuss internal deliberations.
Biden
instructed transition officials months ago that he wanted a range of
options for jobs available in his administration. By Election Day, the
transition had built a database of 9,000 potential administration hires.
Some 2,500 had already been vetted — half of whom were people of color
and more than half of whom were women. That database now has more than
45,000 entries.
Inside the transition, officials say they have tried to exceed the Rooney Rule
— the NFL requirement that teams interview at least one minority
candidate for every head coaching and high-level job — so that more
would have an opportunity to be considered, according to several people
involved with the transition. That has not stopped criticism of Biden’s
eventual selections, particularly for the highest-profile roles.
Biden prefers to work from paper: His transition team has so farsent him more than 130 detailed background memos on the candidates.
“The
Biden transition team is the most-organized, best-resourced and
most-effective transition team ever,” said David Marchick, director of
the nonpartisan Center for Presidential Transition, who has worked for
months with Trump and Biden transition officials. “Future transition
teams, Republican and Democratic, will be studying their model. They’re
just wickedly organized.”
Four
years ago, President Trump’s transition provided an early indication of
how Trump would conduct his presidency. Potential nominees were paraded
into Trump Tower in New York or to his golf course in Bedminster, N.J.,
to shake hands before television cameras. Trump and Mitt Romney, then a
possible secretary of state, dined on frog legs at Jean-Georges in
Manhattan.
Chris Christie, then governor of New Jersey, had set up a vetting process,
a detailed schedule and 30 volumes of transition documents in the
months before the election, only to get pushed out along with his plans
just days after Trump’s victory. In many cases, Trump, a relative
political newcomer, settled on nominees with whom he had little
relationship but whom he thought looked the part.
In
part because of health protocols, but also by design, Biden’s opening
efforts to form his administration could not be more different.
During
his interactions with potential Cabinet members, which have been mostly
virtual until the formal announcements, he is rarely confrontational,
and more often casually breaks the ice. During a video call with
homeland security candidate Alejandro Mayorkas, the former Obama
administration official stumbled over how to address the
president-elect.
“Just call me Joe,” Biden eventually said, by Mayorkas’s account.
While
Harris’s role is still undefined and her imprint on the choices of the
nominees is so far unapparent, she has been involved in almost every
discussion as Biden makes decisions on his administration, according to
people involved in the process.
“She
is the first and last in the room. He is asking her input and her
feedback,” said a person involved in the transition. “That’s the
partnership Biden had with [President Barack] Obama, and as Harris
wanted with Biden. . . . He wants her feedback.”
The
discussions about Cabinet picks and other high-profile posts are kept
to a very small circle, with Harris and Biden joined by incoming White
House chief of staff Ron Klain and just a handful of others. The mood
veers from light banter — with joking laments from Biden about how he
fractured his foot playing with one of his dogs — to the severity of the
economic and health crises his administration will confront.
“He gave us all the following advice: These are tough jobs, make sure you take care of yourself and your family,” Mayorkas said.
Former
senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who helped lead Biden’s similar
vice-presidential search process, said Biden’s management style is one
of “a collaborator.”
“He
likes to talk things out,” Dodd said. “He’s not averseat all to people
expressing alternative views. It’s a very healthy approach. He’s not
insular in any way.”
While Biden has a soft spot for hiring people he knows and has long worked with, he likes to have a wide range of options.
“With
the vice-presidential selection process, I had assumed we’d narrow
candidates down to two or three people,” Dodd said. “Joe wanted to see a
lot. He really wanted more of an opportunity to meet with and talk to
folks. It was like six, seven, eight people. I was sort of surprised.”
The
transition team has examined each agency and looked at how it has been
run historically and which model of leadership was most successful — a
chief executive, or a budget expert, or someone who looked through a
regulatory lens. Candidates were judged by how best they fit the model
the transition team decided on for each job, and those options were
presented to the president-elect.
In
most of his picks, Biden has valued expertise — not necessarily in
particular subject areas but in crisis management. In his view, his
administration is inheriting a multipronged crisis, and a government
workforce that has spent four years being disparaged and downplayed.
That is why many of his appointments have extensive government service,
those close to the decision-making say.
That
instinct, however, has led to some unusual picks that have baffled
outside groups that closely follow each department. Xavier Becerra, the
California attorney general, has little background running a health-care
agency but has been nominated as secretary of health and human
services. Denis McDonough, a former chief of staff to Obama, was chosen
to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs despite never having served
in uniform.
In
both cases, the perception of their general abilities overrode outside
concerns about their expertise in those specific areas.
Biden
has always been one who stews over difficult decisions, letting them
linger and growing agitated with those who try to rush him. Deciding
whether to run for president, including for the most recent of his three
campaigns, was a process that stretched later than advisers wanted, as
he ruminated over the possibilities in front of him before making a
final decision.
His
advisers describe a decision-making and hiring approach that resembles
the playing of an accordion, starting wide and then narrowing — and
then, sometimes suddenly, expanding once more.
Becerra
was initially not a top candidate for HHS, but then suddenly was
filling out paperwork to be vetted late in the process. Retired Army
Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III was not considered a top pick for secretary of
defense until shortly before Biden announced his nomination, causing his
team to scramble to line up support and catching key Democratic
senators off guard.
The
quest for an attorney general nominee appeared to have narrowed in
recent days, but advisers then began floating the name of New York Gov.
Andrew M. Cuomo (D), according to two people close to the process, even
though he has repeatedly denied interest in t he job and Biden has been
primarily focused on a trio of other candidates.
Biden
views his decision-making as taking into account broad amounts of
information and then relying on his gut — and what he considers to be
his forte, homing in on what is politically possible.
“I
measure what happens, how the leaders that I’ve served with based on
. . . whether their judgment about what to do comes from their gut or
their head,” he said earlier this year during a virtual roundtable to
discuss rural issues in Wisconsin.
“I
trust people who start with their gut,” he added. “And they have had a
head bright enough to know what to do about that gut feeling. People who
arrive at it purely from intellectual standpoint, they’re not always
ones that can be counted on to stay through at the very end when it gets
really tough. . . . It starts here in the gut, and it moves to the
head.”
Those who have worked with Biden say he trusts his instincts even when they run counter to the advice he is given.
“He’ll
be the first to tell you, ‘I have better political instincts than all
of you,’ ” said one adviser. “He wants the recommendations. He will hear
varied perspectives, and he wants people to present their case. But at
the end of the day he listens to his gut. If everybody is like, ‘Sir, we
have to go right,’ and he says, ‘My gut says we have to go left,’ he’s
going to give his gut a lot of weight.”
Harris
and Biden, who receive the same packets of information on potential
appointees, ask numerous follow-up questions in their interviews, at
times evaluating two candidates against each other or trying to
determine whether a substantive difference between Biden’s position and
those of the potential nominees is a disqualifier.
Becerra, for example, has long been a proponent of Medicare-for-all,
the health-care plan Biden campaigned against, instead favoring
expansion of Obamacare. But those differences were not deemed a big
enough problem to thwart his nomination.
Most
of Biden’s choices so far are aligned with his views — and, in many
cases, have helped shape his views over the decades. His nominee for
secretary of state, Tony Blinken, is one of Biden’s longest-serving
foreign policy advisers, helping craft lines that Biden still quotes to
this day. Klain, the chief of staff, was Biden’s chief of staff when he
was vice president.
Biden’s
virtual sessions have at times been folksy and conversational, much as
he appears in public. If a dog barks during a presentation, he defuses
the tension by laughing about it. If a staff member’s children walk into
the screen, he’ll engage them in conversation.
“Biden
understands it’s so much bigger than him,” said Rep. Cedric L. Richmond
(D-La.), whom Biden has named as senior adviser and director of the
White House Office of Public Engagement. “He’s not caught up on title
and he’s not caught up on what people call him in the interview. . . .
Trump is erratic and it’s all about Trump. If you do anything to take
attention away from him, he acts like a child. Biden does not seek or
crave attention.”
But, publicly and privately, he does like to talk.
“When
I first sat down with Joe Biden, it was like I had known this man for
10 years. I didn’t know him at all,” said one person who has interviewed
with Biden in the past. “But by the end, he’s offering his cellphone
number and making jokes and talking about family. That’s just who Joe
Biden is.”
I'm so thrilled to have a good, decent, personable, caring individual- and with Harris a team player- coming into office next year as our president! AN amazingly refreshing change from the horrors of the last four years!
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man [or woman] who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
Thick
packets have been delivered regularly to President-elect Joe Biden’s
Wilmington, Del., home, providing meticulous details on each potential
Cabinet member’s strengths, weaknesses and possible areas of conflict.
Biden has been conducting virtual interviews with final candidates,
focusing on their values and life stories nearly as much as their
approach to the departments they would lead.
He
has made Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris perhaps his closest
partner in the Cabinet-selection effort; she has interviewed each
candidate separately and traded notes with Biden afterward in what
people close to the transition say has been an important step in
deepening their working relationship.
Biden’s
transition — which began months before the election results were known —
is providing the first portrait, if one largely conducted behind the
scenes, of his style as a manager and decision-maker in chief.
From
the outside, advocates, groups and members of Congress can find his
process cryptic and unpredictable as they attempt to discern which
directions Biden and his small core of advisers are leaning, only to
find out that he has abruptly switched course. Some nominations have
been handled much more quickly than expected, while other decisions have
lingered, creating some frustration even among allies. Proponents of
demographic and ideological diversity have complained that he has vested too much power in more-moderate White officials like himself.
But
Biden, in what was a defining feature of his campaign, has largely
shrugged off the criticism, confident in his own approach to what he
sees as a gut-check decision-making process. Lately, he has become more
animated in defending some of the choices that his internal
deliberations have yielded, urging those on the outside to take his full
Cabinet into consideration.
“This
Cabinet will be the most representative of any Cabinet in American
history,” Biden said Wednesday while introducing Pete Buttigieg, who would be the first openly gay Cabinet secretary, as his nominee to run the Transportation Department. “We’ll have a Cabinet of barrier breakers, a Cabinet of firsts.”
President-elect
Joe Biden has chosen Pete Buttigieg, a former rival for the Democratic
presidential nomination, to lead the U.S. Transportation Department.
(Reuters)
The
formation of the Biden Cabinet began much earlier and has been far more
comprehensively planned than previously known, according to multiple
people close to the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity to
discuss internal deliberations.
Biden
instructed transition officials months ago that he wanted a range of
options for jobs available in his administration. By Election Day, the
transition had built a database of 9,000 potential administration hires.
Some 2,500 had already been vetted — half of whom were people of color
and more than half of whom were women. That database now has more than
45,000 entries.
Inside the transition, officials say they have tried to exceed the Rooney Rule
— the NFL requirement that teams interview at least one minority
candidate for every head coaching and high-level job — so that more
would have an opportunity to be considered, according to several people
involved with the transition. That has not stopped criticism of Biden’s
eventual selections, particularly for the highest-profile roles.
Biden prefers to work from paper: His transition team has so farsent him more than 130 detailed background memos on the candidates.
“The
Biden transition team is the most-organized, best-resourced and
most-effective transition team ever,” said David Marchick, director of
the nonpartisan Center for Presidential Transition, who has worked for
months with Trump and Biden transition officials. “Future transition
teams, Republican and Democratic, will be studying their model. They’re
just wickedly organized.”
Four
years ago, President Trump’s transition provided an early indication of
how Trump would conduct his presidency. Potential nominees were paraded
into Trump Tower in New York or to his golf course in Bedminster, N.J.,
to shake hands before television cameras. Trump and Mitt Romney, then a
possible secretary of state, dined on frog legs at Jean-Georges in
Manhattan.
Chris Christie, then governor of New Jersey, had set up a vetting process,
a detailed schedule and 30 volumes of transition documents in the
months before the election, only to get pushed out along with his plans
just days after Trump’s victory. In many cases, Trump, a relative
political newcomer, settled on nominees with whom he had little
relationship but whom he thought looked the part.
In
part because of health protocols, but also by design, Biden’s opening
efforts to form his administration could not be more different.
During
his interactions with potential Cabinet members, which have been mostly
virtual until the formal announcements, he is rarely confrontational,
and more often casually breaks the ice. During a video call with
homeland security candidate Alejandro Mayorkas, the former Obama
administration official stumbled over how to address the
president-elect.
“Just call me Joe,” Biden eventually said, by Mayorkas’s account.
While
Harris’s role is still undefined and her imprint on the choices of the
nominees is so far unapparent, she has been involved in almost every
discussion as Biden makes decisions on his administration, according to
people involved in the process.
“She
is the first and last in the room. He is asking her input and her
feedback,” said a person involved in the transition. “That’s the
partnership Biden had with [President Barack] Obama, and as Harris
wanted with Biden. . . . He wants her feedback.”
The
discussions about Cabinet picks and other high-profile posts are kept
to a very small circle, with Harris and Biden joined by incoming White
House chief of staff Ron Klain and just a handful of others. The mood
veers from light banter — with joking laments from Biden about how he
fractured his foot playing with one of his dogs — to the severity of the
economic and health crises his administration will confront.
“He gave us all the following advice: These are tough jobs, make sure you take care of yourself and your family,” Mayorkas said.
Former
senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who helped lead Biden’s similar
vice-presidential search process, said Biden’s management style is one
of “a collaborator.”
“He
likes to talk things out,” Dodd said. “He’s not averseat all to people
expressing alternative views. It’s a very healthy approach. He’s not
insular in any way.”
While Biden has a soft spot for hiring people he knows and has long worked with, he likes to have a wide range of options.
“With
the vice-presidential selection process, I had assumed we’d narrow
candidates down to two or three people,” Dodd said. “Joe wanted to see a
lot. He really wanted more of an opportunity to meet with and talk to
folks. It was like six, seven, eight people. I was sort of surprised.”
The
transition team has examined each agency and looked at how it has been
run historically and which model of leadership was most successful — a
chief executive, or a budget expert, or someone who looked through a
regulatory lens. Candidates were judged by how best they fit the model
the transition team decided on for each job, and those options were
presented to the president-elect.
In
most of his picks, Biden has valued expertise — not necessarily in
particular subject areas but in crisis management. In his view, his
administration is inheriting a multipronged crisis, and a government
workforce that has spent four years being disparaged and downplayed.
That is why many of his appointments have extensive government service,
those close to the decision-making say.
That
instinct, however, has led to some unusual picks that have baffled
outside groups that closely follow each department. Xavier Becerra, the
California attorney general, has little background running a health-care
agency but has been nominated as secretary of health and human
services. Denis McDonough, a former chief of staff to Obama, was chosen
to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs despite never having served
in uniform.
In
both cases, the perception of their general abilities overrode outside
concerns about their expertise in those specific areas.
Biden
has always been one who stews over difficult decisions, letting them
linger and growing agitated with those who try to rush him. Deciding
whether to run for president, including for the most recent of his three
campaigns, was a process that stretched later than advisers wanted, as
he ruminated over the possibilities in front of him before making a
final decision.
His
advisers describe a decision-making and hiring approach that resembles
the playing of an accordion, starting wide and then narrowing — and
then, sometimes suddenly, expanding once more.
Becerra
was initially not a top candidate for HHS, but then suddenly was
filling out paperwork to be vetted late in the process. Retired Army
Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III was not considered a top pick for secretary of
defense until shortly before Biden announced his nomination, causing his
team to scramble to line up support and catching key Democratic
senators off guard.
The
quest for an attorney general nominee appeared to have narrowed in
recent days, but advisers then began floating the name of New York Gov.
Andrew M. Cuomo (D), according to two people close to the process, even
though he has repeatedly denied interest in t he job and Biden has been
primarily focused on a trio of other candidates.
Biden
views his decision-making as taking into account broad amounts of
information and then relying on his gut — and what he considers to be
his forte, homing in on what is politically possible.
“I
measure what happens, how the leaders that I’ve served with based on
. . . whether their judgment about what to do comes from their gut or
their head,” he said earlier this year during a virtual roundtable to
discuss rural issues in Wisconsin.
“I
trust people who start with their gut,” he added. “And they have had a
head bright enough to know what to do about that gut feeling. People who
arrive at it purely from intellectual standpoint, they’re not always
ones that can be counted on to stay through at the very end when it gets
really tough. . . . It starts here in the gut, and it moves to the
head.”
Those who have worked with Biden say he trusts his instincts even when they run counter to the advice he is given.
“He’ll
be the first to tell you, ‘I have better political instincts than all
of you,’ ” said one adviser. “He wants the recommendations. He will hear
varied perspectives, and he wants people to present their case. But at
the end of the day he listens to his gut. If everybody is like, ‘Sir, we
have to go right,’ and he says, ‘My gut says we have to go left,’ he’s
going to give his gut a lot of weight.”
Harris
and Biden, who receive the same packets of information on potential
appointees, ask numerous follow-up questions in their interviews, at
times evaluating two candidates against each other or trying to
determine whether a substantive difference between Biden’s position and
those of the potential nominees is a disqualifier.
Becerra, for example, has long been a proponent of Medicare-for-all,
the health-care plan Biden campaigned against, instead favoring
expansion of Obamacare. But those differences were not deemed a big
enough problem to thwart his nomination.
Most
of Biden’s choices so far are aligned with his views — and, in many
cases, have helped shape his views over the decades. His nominee for
secretary of state, Tony Blinken, is one of Biden’s longest-serving
foreign policy advisers, helping craft lines that Biden still quotes to
this day. Klain, the chief of staff, was Biden’s chief of staff when he
was vice president.
Biden’s
virtual sessions have at times been folksy and conversational, much as
he appears in public. If a dog barks during a presentation, he defuses
the tension by laughing about it. If a staff member’s children walk into
the screen, he’ll engage them in conversation.
“Biden
understands it’s so much bigger than him,” said Rep. Cedric L. Richmond
(D-La.), whom Biden has named as senior adviser and director of the
White House Office of Public Engagement. “He’s not caught up on title
and he’s not caught up on what people call him in the interview. . . .
Trump is erratic and it’s all about Trump. If you do anything to take
attention away from him, he acts like a child. Biden does not seek or
crave attention.”
But, publicly and privately, he does like to talk.
“When
I first sat down with Joe Biden, it was like I had known this man for
10 years. I didn’t know him at all,” said one person who has interviewed
with Biden in the past. “But by the end, he’s offering his cellphone
number and making jokes and talking about family. That’s just who Joe
Biden is.”
I'm so thrilled to have a good, decent, personable, caring individual- and with Harris a team player- coming into office next year as our president! AN amazingly refreshing change from the horrors of the last four years!
i just hope they actually do something and not just more of the same promises promises promises and no action. we need serious, americans will say it's "radical", action on climate change. but seeing how so many freak out about any type of change to their lives and livelihoods (I'M NOT WEARING A MASK), I don't have a lot of hope for public support.
Thick
packets have been delivered regularly to President-elect Joe Biden’s
Wilmington, Del., home, providing meticulous details on each potential
Cabinet member’s strengths, weaknesses and possible areas of conflict.
Biden has been conducting virtual interviews with final candidates,
focusing on their values and life stories nearly as much as their
approach to the departments they would lead.
He
has made Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris perhaps his closest
partner in the Cabinet-selection effort; she has interviewed each
candidate separately and traded notes with Biden afterward in what
people close to the transition say has been an important step in
deepening their working relationship.
Biden’s
transition — which began months before the election results were known —
is providing the first portrait, if one largely conducted behind the
scenes, of his style as a manager and decision-maker in chief.
From
the outside, advocates, groups and members of Congress can find his
process cryptic and unpredictable as they attempt to discern which
directions Biden and his small core of advisers are leaning, only to
find out that he has abruptly switched course. Some nominations have
been handled much more quickly than expected, while other decisions have
lingered, creating some frustration even among allies. Proponents of
demographic and ideological diversity have complained that he has vested too much power in more-moderate White officials like himself.
But
Biden, in what was a defining feature of his campaign, has largely
shrugged off the criticism, confident in his own approach to what he
sees as a gut-check decision-making process. Lately, he has become more
animated in defending some of the choices that his internal
deliberations have yielded, urging those on the outside to take his full
Cabinet into consideration.
“This
Cabinet will be the most representative of any Cabinet in American
history,” Biden said Wednesday while introducing Pete Buttigieg, who would be the first openly gay Cabinet secretary, as his nominee to run the Transportation Department. “We’ll have a Cabinet of barrier breakers, a Cabinet of firsts.”
President-elect
Joe Biden has chosen Pete Buttigieg, a former rival for the Democratic
presidential nomination, to lead the U.S. Transportation Department.
(Reuters)
The
formation of the Biden Cabinet began much earlier and has been far more
comprehensively planned than previously known, according to multiple
people close to the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity to
discuss internal deliberations.
Biden
instructed transition officials months ago that he wanted a range of
options for jobs available in his administration. By Election Day, the
transition had built a database of 9,000 potential administration hires.
Some 2,500 had already been vetted — half of whom were people of color
and more than half of whom were women. That database now has more than
45,000 entries.
Inside the transition, officials say they have tried to exceed the Rooney Rule
— the NFL requirement that teams interview at least one minority
candidate for every head coaching and high-level job — so that more
would have an opportunity to be considered, according to several people
involved with the transition. That has not stopped criticism of Biden’s
eventual selections, particularly for the highest-profile roles.
Biden prefers to work from paper: His transition team has so farsent him more than 130 detailed background memos on the candidates.
“The
Biden transition team is the most-organized, best-resourced and
most-effective transition team ever,” said David Marchick, director of
the nonpartisan Center for Presidential Transition, who has worked for
months with Trump and Biden transition officials. “Future transition
teams, Republican and Democratic, will be studying their model. They’re
just wickedly organized.”
Four
years ago, President Trump’s transition provided an early indication of
how Trump would conduct his presidency. Potential nominees were paraded
into Trump Tower in New York or to his golf course in Bedminster, N.J.,
to shake hands before television cameras. Trump and Mitt Romney, then a
possible secretary of state, dined on frog legs at Jean-Georges in
Manhattan.
Chris Christie, then governor of New Jersey, had set up a vetting process,
a detailed schedule and 30 volumes of transition documents in the
months before the election, only to get pushed out along with his plans
just days after Trump’s victory. In many cases, Trump, a relative
political newcomer, settled on nominees with whom he had little
relationship but whom he thought looked the part.
In
part because of health protocols, but also by design, Biden’s opening
efforts to form his administration could not be more different.
During
his interactions with potential Cabinet members, which have been mostly
virtual until the formal announcements, he is rarely confrontational,
and more often casually breaks the ice. During a video call with
homeland security candidate Alejandro Mayorkas, the former Obama
administration official stumbled over how to address the
president-elect.
“Just call me Joe,” Biden eventually said, by Mayorkas’s account.
While
Harris’s role is still undefined and her imprint on the choices of the
nominees is so far unapparent, she has been involved in almost every
discussion as Biden makes decisions on his administration, according to
people involved in the process.
“She
is the first and last in the room. He is asking her input and her
feedback,” said a person involved in the transition. “That’s the
partnership Biden had with [President Barack] Obama, and as Harris
wanted with Biden. . . . He wants her feedback.”
The
discussions about Cabinet picks and other high-profile posts are kept
to a very small circle, with Harris and Biden joined by incoming White
House chief of staff Ron Klain and just a handful of others. The mood
veers from light banter — with joking laments from Biden about how he
fractured his foot playing with one of his dogs — to the severity of the
economic and health crises his administration will confront.
“He gave us all the following advice: These are tough jobs, make sure you take care of yourself and your family,” Mayorkas said.
Former
senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who helped lead Biden’s similar
vice-presidential search process, said Biden’s management style is one
of “a collaborator.”
“He
likes to talk things out,” Dodd said. “He’s not averseat all to people
expressing alternative views. It’s a very healthy approach. He’s not
insular in any way.”
While Biden has a soft spot for hiring people he knows and has long worked with, he likes to have a wide range of options.
“With
the vice-presidential selection process, I had assumed we’d narrow
candidates down to two or three people,” Dodd said. “Joe wanted to see a
lot. He really wanted more of an opportunity to meet with and talk to
folks. It was like six, seven, eight people. I was sort of surprised.”
The
transition team has examined each agency and looked at how it has been
run historically and which model of leadership was most successful — a
chief executive, or a budget expert, or someone who looked through a
regulatory lens. Candidates were judged by how best they fit the model
the transition team decided on for each job, and those options were
presented to the president-elect.
In
most of his picks, Biden has valued expertise — not necessarily in
particular subject areas but in crisis management. In his view, his
administration is inheriting a multipronged crisis, and a government
workforce that has spent four years being disparaged and downplayed.
That is why many of his appointments have extensive government service,
those close to the decision-making say.
That
instinct, however, has led to some unusual picks that have baffled
outside groups that closely follow each department. Xavier Becerra, the
California attorney general, has little background running a health-care
agency but has been nominated as secretary of health and human
services. Denis McDonough, a former chief of staff to Obama, was chosen
to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs despite never having served
in uniform.
In
both cases, the perception of their general abilities overrode outside
concerns about their expertise in those specific areas.
Biden
has always been one who stews over difficult decisions, letting them
linger and growing agitated with those who try to rush him. Deciding
whether to run for president, including for the most recent of his three
campaigns, was a process that stretched later than advisers wanted, as
he ruminated over the possibilities in front of him before making a
final decision.
His
advisers describe a decision-making and hiring approach that resembles
the playing of an accordion, starting wide and then narrowing — and
then, sometimes suddenly, expanding once more.
Becerra
was initially not a top candidate for HHS, but then suddenly was
filling out paperwork to be vetted late in the process. Retired Army
Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III was not considered a top pick for secretary of
defense until shortly before Biden announced his nomination, causing his
team to scramble to line up support and catching key Democratic
senators off guard.
The
quest for an attorney general nominee appeared to have narrowed in
recent days, but advisers then began floating the name of New York Gov.
Andrew M. Cuomo (D), according to two people close to the process, even
though he has repeatedly denied interest in t he job and Biden has been
primarily focused on a trio of other candidates.
Biden
views his decision-making as taking into account broad amounts of
information and then relying on his gut — and what he considers to be
his forte, homing in on what is politically possible.
“I
measure what happens, how the leaders that I’ve served with based on
. . . whether their judgment about what to do comes from their gut or
their head,” he said earlier this year during a virtual roundtable to
discuss rural issues in Wisconsin.
“I
trust people who start with their gut,” he added. “And they have had a
head bright enough to know what to do about that gut feeling. People who
arrive at it purely from intellectual standpoint, they’re not always
ones that can be counted on to stay through at the very end when it gets
really tough. . . . It starts here in the gut, and it moves to the
head.”
Those who have worked with Biden say he trusts his instincts even when they run counter to the advice he is given.
“He’ll
be the first to tell you, ‘I have better political instincts than all
of you,’ ” said one adviser. “He wants the recommendations. He will hear
varied perspectives, and he wants people to present their case. But at
the end of the day he listens to his gut. If everybody is like, ‘Sir, we
have to go right,’ and he says, ‘My gut says we have to go left,’ he’s
going to give his gut a lot of weight.”
Harris
and Biden, who receive the same packets of information on potential
appointees, ask numerous follow-up questions in their interviews, at
times evaluating two candidates against each other or trying to
determine whether a substantive difference between Biden’s position and
those of the potential nominees is a disqualifier.
Becerra, for example, has long been a proponent of Medicare-for-all,
the health-care plan Biden campaigned against, instead favoring
expansion of Obamacare. But those differences were not deemed a big
enough problem to thwart his nomination.
Most
of Biden’s choices so far are aligned with his views — and, in many
cases, have helped shape his views over the decades. His nominee for
secretary of state, Tony Blinken, is one of Biden’s longest-serving
foreign policy advisers, helping craft lines that Biden still quotes to
this day. Klain, the chief of staff, was Biden’s chief of staff when he
was vice president.
Biden’s
virtual sessions have at times been folksy and conversational, much as
he appears in public. If a dog barks during a presentation, he defuses
the tension by laughing about it. If a staff member’s children walk into
the screen, he’ll engage them in conversation.
“Biden
understands it’s so much bigger than him,” said Rep. Cedric L. Richmond
(D-La.), whom Biden has named as senior adviser and director of the
White House Office of Public Engagement. “He’s not caught up on title
and he’s not caught up on what people call him in the interview. . . .
Trump is erratic and it’s all about Trump. If you do anything to take
attention away from him, he acts like a child. Biden does not seek or
crave attention.”
But, publicly and privately, he does like to talk.
“When
I first sat down with Joe Biden, it was like I had known this man for
10 years. I didn’t know him at all,” said one person who has interviewed
with Biden in the past. “But by the end, he’s offering his cellphone
number and making jokes and talking about family. That’s just who Joe
Biden is.”
I'm so thrilled to have a good, decent, personable, caring individual- and with Harris a team player- coming into office next year as our president! AN amazingly refreshing change from the horrors of the last four years!
i just hope they actually do something and not just more of the same promises promises promises and no action. we need serious, americans will say it's "radical", action on climate change. but seeing how so many freak out about any type of change to their lives and livelihoods (I'M NOT WEARING A MASK), I don't have a lot of hope for public support.
A very good point and the tough action that is going to be needed is facing resistance already even from viewpoints that are deemed relatively "progressive". For example:
Progressives are a minority in America. To win, they need to compromise
The author here makes some points that are fairly convincing, but all this talk of moving with caution is not going to get the job done, especially with global warming. We've already tipped the scale on climate change and now we're told we need to tiptoe? That seems like a sad state of affairs. The U.S. populous in general has become gutless, clueless, selfish, and biased toward inaction. Better to move the needle a little left than not at all, but I don't see it being enough in the long run. I'd bet on that.
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man [or woman] who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Comments
Hilarious....whoever she emailed must have tipped off the reporter
The Golden Age is 2 months away. And guess what….. you’re gonna love it! (teskeinc 11.19.24)
1998: Noblesville; 2003: Noblesville; 2009: EV Nashville, Chicago, Chicago
2010: St Louis, Columbus, Noblesville; 2011: EV Chicago, East Troy, East Troy
2013: London ON, Wrigley; 2014: Cincy, St Louis, Moline (NO CODE)
2016: Lexington, Wrigley #1; 2018: Wrigley, Wrigley, Boston, Boston
2020: Oakland, Oakland: 2021: EV Ohana, Ohana, Ohana, Ohana
2022: Oakland, Oakland, Nashville, Louisville; 2023: Chicago, Chicago, Noblesville
2024: Noblesville, Wrigley, Wrigley, Ohana, Ohana
Biden to Name Campaign Manager, Congressional Ally and Close Friend to Key Staff Jobs
The appointments of Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Representative Cedric Richmond and Steve Ricchetti suggest the importance that the president-elect is placing on surrounding himself with people he trusts.
By Michael D. Shear and Katie Glueck
WASHINGTON — President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. will formally announce key members of his White House staff on Tuesday, naming Representative Cedric L. Richmond of Louisiana to oversee public outreach and installing Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, who managed his presidential campaign, as a deputy chief of staff, a person familiar with the transition said.
Mr. Biden will also announce that Steve Ricchetti, a longtime confidant, will serve in the White House as a counselor to the president. All three will most likely have offices down the hall from the Oval Office, making them among the most senior aides in the West Wing.
Mr. Richmond will inherit a job once held by Valerie Jarrett in the Obama administration. Kellyanne Conway was President Trump’s counselor, the job that Mr. Ricchetti will take. And Ms. O’Malley Dillon will probably oversee White House operations for Mr. Biden.
A spokesman for the transition declined to comment. A person familiar with the transition planning said the three appointments would be announced along with other members of the president-elect’s staff.
Decisions about cabinet secretaries remain several weeks away, according to people close to Mr. Biden, who has spent several days during the past week in closed-door discussions with advisers about the challenge of winning confirmation fights if the Senate remains in Republican control next year.
By contrast, White House staff positions do not require Senate confirmation, leaving the president-elect wide latitude in selecting his West Wing advisers.
The announcements come as Mr. Biden moves quickly to establish his governing agenda and the team he will need to put it into effect once he takes office. The president-elect is under pressure to fill those jobs with people of diverse ethnic and ideological backgrounds, making good on promises he made during his campaign.
But the appointments of Mr. Richmond, Ms. O’Malley Dillon and Mr. Ricchetti — all loyal lieutenants to Mr. Biden — suggest the importance that he is also placing on surrounding himself with people whose advice he implicitly trusts.
Mr. Richmond, who served as a national co-chairman of Mr. Biden’s campaign and was an early supporter, had been widely expected to join the Biden White House. He brings with him deep relationships across Capitol Hill. His new job was reported earlier by Bloomberg.
Mr. Richmond, a Democrat whose district includes most of New Orleans, has scheduled a news conference for Tuesday where he is expected to announce he is leaving Congress. In a brief phone call on Monday night, he laughingly declined to confirm that he was joining Mr. Biden’s staff but acknowledged that he would discuss his “future” on Tuesday.
Mr. Richmond was formerly the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, and he has a close relationship with Representative James E. Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina, whose endorsement in February helped revive Mr. Biden’s campaign. Mr. Richmond’s district is safely Democratic, and his departure from Congress is unlikely to cost the party another seat after an election where their majority was weakened.
Mr. Richmond is likely to have broad responsibilities in his senior role and will continue to interact with Congress, according to people familiar with the transition. Others said they expected him to serve as one of the people most willing to give the new president frank and candid advice behind closed doors.
Ms. O’Malley Dillon, a veteran of former President Barack Obama’s campaigns, has been credited with steering Mr. Biden’s presidential bid through the difficulties of the coronavirus pandemic and the challenge of running against an unpredictable rival like Mr. Trump. Her appointment was reported earlier by NBC News.
She assumed the role of campaign manager in mid-March, just as the severity of the coronavirus outbreak was becoming clear to many Americans. Two days after she was named to the role, Biden campaign offices around the country shut down. She learned to remotely navigate the team factions and transformed a shoestring primary operation into a general election organization.
Ms. O’Malley Dillon’s team faced criticism and second-guessing over the light footprint Mr. Biden’s campaign maintained in key battleground states during the pandemic, and throughout the campaign there were tensions between some of the earliest Biden aides and those she brought in as she built the team.
But she was respected inside the campaign for streamlining and organizing what had been a small and underfunded operation, and her expected appointment is a clear sign of the degree to which she is trusted by the president-elect.
Mr. Ricchetti is a close adviser and longtime lobbyist who has been by Mr. Biden’s side for years. He lobbied for the pharmaceutical industry and served as Mr. Biden’s chief of staff when he was the vice president.
As one of Mr. Biden’s most trusted advisers and a longtime member of his tight-knit inner circle, Mr. Ricchetti is expected to have a broad portfolio and a senior role within the administration. During the campaign, he maintained deep relationships across Capitol Hill and in the donor community, sometimes serving as a kind of gatekeeper to the campaign for Democratic heavyweights.
Mr. Biden is likely to move quickly on other key White House jobs as well.
He still has to assemble a communications team, including a press secretary, who will often serve as the public face of the administration. Among the possible candidates for that job is Symone Sanders, who has served as one of his top communications advisers during the campaign.
The president-elect will also have to choose a White House counsel, a key job in an era of divided government, when members of the other party often engage in legal clashes with the president. Dana Remus, who worked in the counsel’s office during Mr. Obama’s tenure, was the chief lawyer for Mr. Biden’s campaign.
And Mr. Biden will need to choose aides to oversee national security, homeland security and economics in his White House. Announcements on some of those positions could also come as soon as Tuesday.
Pranshu Verma and Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting.
Michael D. Shear is a White House correspondent. He previously worked at The Washington Post and was a member of their Pulitzer Prize-winning team that covered the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007. @shearm
Katie Glueck is a national politics reporter at The New York Times, where she covers the 2020 presidential campaign. She previously covered politics for McClatchy’s Washington bureau and for Politico. @katieglueck
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
I'm interested in this one and I hope to see reality, respect and some dignity restored to the whole process. That shouldn't be a high bar.
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
That Kayleigh McEnany is a sharp tack, she makes Spicer and Huckabee look like utter fools.
I worry about her, she could be a dangerous force in politics in the future...
That Kayleigh McEnany is a sharp tack, she makes Spicer and Huckabee look like utter fools.
I worry about her, she could be a dangerous force in politics in the future...
he brought soul eaters liar in chief onto this thread...
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
The Golden Age is 2 months away. And guess what….. you’re gonna love it! (teskeinc 11.19.24)
1998: Noblesville; 2003: Noblesville; 2009: EV Nashville, Chicago, Chicago
2010: St Louis, Columbus, Noblesville; 2011: EV Chicago, East Troy, East Troy
2013: London ON, Wrigley; 2014: Cincy, St Louis, Moline (NO CODE)
2016: Lexington, Wrigley #1; 2018: Wrigley, Wrigley, Boston, Boston
2020: Oakland, Oakland: 2021: EV Ohana, Ohana, Ohana, Ohana
2022: Oakland, Oakland, Nashville, Louisville; 2023: Chicago, Chicago, Noblesville
2024: Noblesville, Wrigley, Wrigley, Ohana, Ohana
even if I look and act really crazy.
There are no kings inside the gates of eden
WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Joe Biden is moving to fill out his national security team with a raft of appointments to top positions that signal his intent to repudiate the Trump administration’s “America First” doctrine.
The six picks announced on Monday, almost all of them alumni of the Obama administration, represent a fundamental shift away from President Donald Trump’s policies and personnel selections. They also mark a return to a more traditional approach to America’s relations with the rest of the world and reflect Biden’s campaign promises to have his Cabinet reflect the diversity of the American population.
In choosing foreign policy veterans, Biden is seeking to upend Trump’s war on the so-called “deep state” that saw an exodus of career officials from government. He will nominate his longtime adviser Antony Blinken to be secretary of state, lawyer Alejandro Mayorkas to be homeland security secretary, Linda Thomas-Greenfield to be ambassador to the United Nations, Jake Sullivan to be his national security adviser, Avril Haines to be Sullivan's deputy, and former Secretary of State John Kerry to be his climate change envoy.
The choices also suggest Biden intends to make good on campaign promises to have his Cabinet reflect the diversity of the American population with Greenfield, a Black woman, at the helm of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations and Mayorkas, a Cuban-American lawyer who will be the first Latino to lead Homeland Security.
They “are experienced, crisis-tested leaders who are ready to hit the ground running on day one,” the transition said in a statement. “These officials will start working immediately to rebuild our institutions, renew and reimagine American leadership to keep Americans safe at home and abroad, and address the defining challenges of our time — from infectious disease, to terrorism, nuclear proliferation, cyber threats, and climate change.”
In making the announcements, Biden moved forward with plans to fill out his government even as Trump refuses to concede defeat in the Nov. 3 election, has pursued baseless legal challenges in several key states and has worked to stymie the transition process.
The stakes of a smooth transition are especially high this year because Biden will take office amid the worst pandemic in more than a century, which will likely require a full government response to contain.
Perhaps the best known of the bunch is Kerry, who made climate change one of his top priorities while serving as Obama's secretary of state.
“America will soon have a government that treats the climate crisis as the urgent national security threat it is,” Kerry said. “I’m proud to partner with the president-elect, our allies, and the young leaders of the climate movement to take on this crisis as the president’s climate envoy.”
Sullivan, who at 43 will be one of the youngest national security advisers in history, was a top aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton before becoming then-Vice President Biden's national security adviser. He said the president-elect had “taught me what it takes to safeguard our national security at the highest levels of our government.”
“Now, he has asked me to serve as his national security adviser,” Sullivan said. “In service, I will do everything in my power to keep our country safe.”
The posts to be held by Kerry, Sullivan and Haines do not require Senate confirmation.
Blinken, 58, served as deputy secretary of state and deputy national security adviser during the Obama administration and has close ties with Biden. If nominated and confirmed, he would be a leading force in the incoming administration’s bid to reframe the U.S. relationship with the rest of the world after four years in which President Donald Trump questioned longtime alliances.
Blinken recently participated in a national security briefing with Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and has weighed in publicly on notable foreign policy issues in Egypt and Ethiopia.
Blinken would inherit a deeply demoralized and depleted career workforce at the State Department. Trump’s two secretaries of state, Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo, offered weak resistance to the administration’s attempts to gut the agency, which were thwarted only by congressional intervention.
Although the department escaped massive proposed cuts of more than 30% in its budget for three consecutive years, it has seen a significant number of departures from its senior and rising mid-level ranks, from which many diplomats have opted to retire or leave the foreign service given limited prospects for advancements under an administration that they believe does not value their expertise.
A graduate of Harvard University and Columbia Law School and a longtime Democratic foreign policy presence, Blinken has aligned himself with numerous former senior national security officials who have called for a major reinvestment in American diplomacy and renewed emphasis on global engagement.
“Democracy is in retreat around the world, and unfortunately it’s also in retreat at home because of the president taking a two-by-four to its institutions, its values and its people every day," Blinken told The Associated Press in September. "Our friends know that Joe Biden knows who they are. So do our adversaries. That difference would be felt on day one.”
Blinken served on the National Security Council during the Clinton administration before becoming staff director for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Biden was chair of the panel. In the early years of the Obama administration, Blinken returned to the NSC and was then-Vice President Biden’s national security adviser before he moved to the State Department to serve as deputy to Secretary of State John Kerry.
Biden has pledged to build the most diverse government in modern history, and he and his team often speak about their desire for his administration to reflect America. He is being watched to see whether he will make history by nominating the first woman to lead the Pentagon, the Treasury Department or the Department of Veterans Affairs or the first African American at the top of the Defense Department, the Interior Department or the Treasury Department.
Ron Klain, Biden’s incoming chief of staff, said Sunday the Trump administration’s refusal to clear the way for Biden’s team to have access to key information about agencies and federal dollars for the transition is taking its toll on planning, including the Cabinet selection process. Trump’s General Services Administration has yet to acknowledge that Biden won the election — a determination that would remove those roadblocks.
“We’re not in a position to get background checks on Cabinet nominees. And so there are definite impacts. Those impacts escalate every day,” Klain told ABC’s “This Week.”
__
Associated Press writers Julie Pace in Washington, Alexandra Jaffe in Wilmington, Delaware, and Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed to this report.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
There are no kings inside the gates of eden
Amazing, isn't it? A true clown to the very end!
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
By Matt Viser
45,000 names, 130 packets of information, and gut instincts: How Biden is managing his transition
Thick packets have been delivered regularly to President-elect Joe Biden’s Wilmington, Del., home, providing meticulous details on each potential Cabinet member’s strengths, weaknesses and possible areas of conflict. Biden has been conducting virtual interviews with final candidates, focusing on their values and life stories nearly as much as their approach to the departments they would lead.
He has made Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris perhaps his closest partner in the Cabinet-selection effort; she has interviewed each candidate separately and traded notes with Biden afterward in what people close to the transition say has been an important step in deepening their working relationship.
Biden’s transition — which began months before the election results were known — is providing the first portrait, if one largely conducted behind the scenes, of his style as a manager and decision-maker in chief.
From the outside, advocates, groups and members of Congress can find his process cryptic and unpredictable as they attempt to discern which directions Biden and his small core of advisers are leaning, only to find out that he has abruptly switched course. Some nominations have been handled much more quickly than expected, while other decisions have lingered, creating some frustration even among allies. Proponents of demographic and ideological diversity have complained that he has vested too much power in more-moderate White officials like himself.
But Biden, in what was a defining feature of his campaign, has largely shrugged off the criticism, confident in his own approach to what he sees as a gut-check decision-making process. Lately, he has become more animated in defending some of the choices that his internal deliberations have yielded, urging those on the outside to take his full Cabinet into consideration.
“This Cabinet will be the most representative of any Cabinet in American history,” Biden said Wednesday while introducing Pete Buttigieg, who would be the first openly gay Cabinet secretary, as his nominee to run
the Transportation Department. “We’ll have a Cabinet of barrier breakers, a Cabinet of firsts.”
The formation of the Biden Cabinet began much earlier and has been far more comprehensively planned than previously known, according to multiple people close to the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Biden instructed transition officials months ago that he wanted a range of options for jobs available in his administration. By Election Day, the transition had built a database of 9,000 potential administration hires. Some 2,500 had already been vetted — half of whom were people of color and more than half of whom were women. That database now has more than 45,000 entries.
Inside the transition, officials say they have tried to exceed the Rooney Rule — the NFL requirement that teams interview at least one minority candidate for every head coaching and high-level job — so that more would have an opportunity to be considered, according to several people involved with the transition. That has not stopped criticism of Biden’s eventual selections, particularly for the highest-profile roles.
Biden prefers to work from paper: His transition team has so farsent him more than 130 detailed background memos on the candidates.
“The Biden transition team is the most-organized, best-resourced and most-effective transition team ever,” said David Marchick, director of the nonpartisan Center for Presidential Transition, who has worked for months with Trump and Biden transition officials. “Future transition teams, Republican and Democratic, will be studying their model. They’re just wickedly organized.”
Four years ago, President Trump’s transition provided an early indication of how Trump would conduct his presidency. Potential nominees were paraded into Trump Tower in New York or to his golf course in Bedminster, N.J., to shake hands before television cameras. Trump and Mitt Romney, then a possible secretary of state, dined on frog legs at Jean-Georges in Manhattan.
Chris Christie, then governor of New Jersey, had set up a vetting process, a detailed schedule and 30 volumes of transition documents in the months before the election, only to get pushed out along with his plans just days after Trump’s victory. In many cases, Trump, a relative political newcomer, settled on nominees with whom he had little relationship but whom he thought looked the part.
In part because of health protocols, but also by design, Biden’s opening efforts to form his administration could not be more different.
During his interactions with potential Cabinet members, which have been mostly virtual until the formal announcements, he is rarely confrontational, and more often casually breaks the ice. During a video call with homeland security candidate Alejandro Mayorkas, the former Obama administration official stumbled over how to address the president-elect.
“Just call me Joe,” Biden eventually said, by Mayorkas’s account.
While Harris’s role is still undefined and her imprint on the choices of the nominees is so far unapparent, she has been involved in almost every discussion as Biden makes decisions on his administration, according to people involved in the process.
“She is the first and last in the room. He is asking her input and her feedback,” said a person involved in the transition. “That’s the partnership Biden had with [President Barack] Obama, and as Harris wanted with Biden. . . . He wants her feedback.”
The discussions about Cabinet picks and other high-profile posts are kept to a very small circle, with Harris and Biden joined by incoming White House chief of staff Ron Klain and just a handful of others. The mood veers from light banter — with joking laments from Biden about how he fractured his foot playing with one of his dogs — to the severity of the economic and health crises his administration will confront.
“He gave us all the following advice: These are tough jobs, make sure you take care of yourself and your family,” Mayorkas said.
Former senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who helped lead Biden’s similar vice-presidential search process, said Biden’s management style is one of “a collaborator.”
“He likes to talk things out,” Dodd said. “He’s not averseat all to people expressing alternative views. It’s a very healthy approach. He’s not insular in any way.”
While Biden has a soft spot for hiring people he knows and has long worked with, he likes to have a wide range of options.
“With the vice-presidential selection process, I had assumed we’d narrow candidates down to two or three people,” Dodd said. “Joe wanted to see a lot. He really wanted more of an opportunity to meet with and talk to folks. It was like six, seven, eight people. I was sort of surprised.”
The transition team has examined each agency and looked at how it has been run historically and which model of leadership was most successful — a chief executive, or a budget expert, or someone who looked through a regulatory lens. Candidates were judged by how best they fit the model the transition team decided on for each job, and those options were presented to the president-elect.
In most of his picks, Biden has valued expertise — not necessarily in particular subject areas but in crisis management. In his view, his administration is inheriting a multipronged crisis, and a government workforce that has spent four years being disparaged and downplayed. That is why many of his appointments have extensive government service, those close to the decision-making say.
That instinct, however, has led to some unusual picks that have baffled outside groups that closely follow each department. Xavier Becerra, the California attorney general, has little background running a health-care agency but has been nominated as secretary of health and human services. Denis McDonough, a former chief of staff to Obama, was chosen to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs despite never having served in uniform.
In both cases, the perception of their general abilities overrode outside concerns about their expertise in those specific areas.
Biden has always been one who stews over difficult decisions, letting them linger and growing agitated with those who try to rush him. Deciding whether to run for president, including for the most recent of his three campaigns, was a process that stretched later than advisers wanted, as he ruminated over the possibilities in front of him before making a final decision.
His advisers describe a decision-making and hiring approach that resembles the playing of an accordion, starting wide and then narrowing — and then, sometimes suddenly, expanding once more.
Becerra was initially not a top candidate for HHS, but then suddenly was filling out paperwork to be vetted late in the process. Retired Army Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III was not considered a top pick for secretary of defense until shortly before Biden announced his nomination, causing his team to scramble to line up support and catching key Democratic senators off guard.
The quest for an attorney general nominee appeared to have narrowed in recent days, but advisers then began floating the name of New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D), according to two people close to the process, even though he has repeatedly denied interest in t he job and Biden has been primarily focused on a trio of other candidates.
Biden views his decision-making as taking into account broad amounts of information and then relying on his gut — and what he considers to be his forte, homing in on what is politically possible.
“I measure what happens, how the leaders that I’ve served with based on . . . whether their judgment about what to do comes from their gut or their head,” he said earlier this year during a virtual roundtable to discuss rural issues in Wisconsin.
“I trust people who start with their gut,” he added. “And they have had a head bright enough to know what to do about that gut feeling. People who arrive at it purely from intellectual standpoint, they’re not always ones that can be counted on to stay through at the very end when it gets really tough. . . . It starts here in the gut, and it moves to the head.”
Those who have worked with Biden say he trusts his instincts even when they run counter to the advice he is given.
“He’ll be the first to tell you, ‘I have better political instincts than all of you,’ ” said one adviser. “He wants the recommendations. He will hear varied perspectives, and he wants people to present their case. But at the end of the day he listens to his gut. If everybody is like, ‘Sir, we have to go right,’ and he says, ‘My gut says we have to go left,’ he’s going to give his gut a lot of weight.”
Harris and Biden, who receive the same packets of information on potential appointees, ask numerous follow-up questions in their interviews, at times evaluating two candidates against each other or trying to determine whether a substantive difference between Biden’s position and those of the potential nominees is a disqualifier.
Becerra, for example, has long been a proponent of Medicare-for-all, the health-care plan Biden campaigned against, instead favoring expansion of Obamacare. But those differences were not deemed a big enough problem to thwart his nomination.
Most of Biden’s choices so far are aligned with his views — and, in many cases, have helped shape his views over the decades. His nominee for secretary of state, Tony Blinken, is one of Biden’s longest-serving foreign policy advisers, helping craft lines that Biden still quotes to this day. Klain, the chief of staff, was Biden’s chief of staff when he was vice president.
Biden’s virtual sessions have at times been folksy and conversational, much as he appears in public. If a dog barks during a presentation, he defuses the tension by laughing about it. If a staff member’s children walk into the screen, he’ll engage them in conversation.
“Biden understands it’s so much bigger than him,” said Rep. Cedric L. Richmond (D-La.), whom Biden has named as senior adviser and director of the White House Office of Public Engagement. “He’s not caught up on title and he’s not caught up on what people call him in the interview. . . . Trump is erratic and it’s all about Trump. If you do anything to take attention away from him, he acts like a child. Biden does not seek or crave attention.”
But, publicly and privately, he does like to talk.
“When I first sat down with Joe Biden, it was like I had known this man for 10 years. I didn’t know him at all,” said one person who has interviewed with Biden in the past. “But by the end, he’s offering his cellphone number and making jokes and talking about family. That’s just who Joe Biden is.”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
i got the feeling that trump and pence were probably in the same room a handful of times. and only when the cameras were there. you definitely won't see any pictures like this:
www.headstonesband.com
www.headstonesband.com
Pete Souza is a fantastic photographer and excelled as WH Photographer.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
I'm so thrilled to have a good, decent, personable, caring individual- and with Harris a team player- coming into office next year as our president! AN amazingly refreshing change from the horrors of the last four years!
www.headstonesband.com
EV
Toronto Film Festival 9/11/2007, '08 - Toronto 1 & 2, '09 - Albany 1, '11 - Chicago 1
Progressives are a minority in America. To win, they need to compromise
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
www.headstonesband.com