The Playbook Podcast

There’s no denying it: Covid is rocking Washington right now. Days after Saturday’s annual Gridiron Club dinner, multiple attendees of the boujee 600-seat confab have come down with it — including Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Joaquin Castro (D-Texas).

Throughout the district on Wednesday, the possible superspreader event was seemingly all anyone could talk about, as NYT’s Katie Rogers writes. Reporters and pols alike found themselves trading text messages about who sat by whom and whether so-and-so who was feeling ill got a positive test result. The entire situation, she notes, is a reminder “that, even as officials seek to pivot away from strict restrictions and encourage Americans to learn to live with the coronavirus, the pandemic is not over.”

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Raghu Manavalan is the Host of POLITICO's Playbook.
Jenny Ament is the Executive Producer of POLITICO Audio.

Sen. Mitt Romney is having a bipartisan moment.

The Utah senator kept everyone in suspense until Monday on how he would vote on Ketanji Brown Jackson's confirmation. He voted against confirming her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit last year, but flipped and will now vote to confirm her to the Supreme Court.

Six weeks ago, House Democrats blew up a bipartisan deal on Covid funding when they stripped $15 billion in pandemic relief money from a bill to fund the government. Biden and Democrats scrambled to find a way to pass a stand-alone bill and they needed a GOP partner. 

Romney stepped in and spent the last month and a half negotiating with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and the White House. They announced a $10 billion deal on Monday. 

On Tuesday, it fell apart. 

Democrats are desperately trying to understand what’s roiling the electorate heading into a brutal midterm environment.

HIT Strategies has been conducting weekly focus groups to find out in real time how Americans are processing events in 2022. On Monday night we watched discussions with two different subgroups of partisan Democrats assembled by the firm: “Black Base, Always vote for Dems, Ages 25+” and “Youth Base; Always vote for Dems, Ages 25 – 39.”

There were significant differences within and between the two groups of nine voters. But there were also some broad takeaways.

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Raghu Manavalan is the Host of POLITICO's Playbook.
Jenny Ament is the Executive Producer of POLITICO Audio.

The White House and Senate Democrats expect Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, to be confirmed by the end of this week. The final two Republicans still in play, Sens. Mitt Romney (Utah) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), could announce how they plan to vote as soon as today.

Clinching a new Supreme Court justice is a big moment for any president. But given the historic nature of Jackson’s nomination, this will be an even bigger deal for Biden. 

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Raghu Manavalan is the Host of POLITICO's Playbook.
Jenny Ament is the Executive Producer of POLITICO Audio.

For President Joe Biden, this was one of those weeks that demonstrated the limits of the powers of the presidency. 

Political scientists often like to rib pundits and the public for having a so-called “Green Lantern” view of the presidency, a theory defined by Dartmouth’s Brendan Nyhan as “the belief that the president can achieve any political or policy objective if only he tries hard enough or uses the right tactics."

In reality, presidents operate under enormous constraints that often make them seem feckless in the face of intractable problems. 

The news at the end of this week makes it clear that Biden has entered the “long slog” period of his first term. The bold ambitions of year one have been downsized. And even with more modest goals, unifying Democrats in Congress has become tougher — and winning over Republicans harder — than ever. Many problems, like inflation, don’t have readily available solutions. And even when Biden is able to act, like on immigration, his choices are politically perilous.

Listen to Playbook Deep Dive: The midterms will be won in the suburbs

Raghu Manavalan is the Host of POLITICO's Playbook.
Jenny Ament is the Executive Producer of POLITICO Audio.

In a pair of meetings with two separate wings of the House Democratic Caucus on Wednesday evening, President Joe Biden received mixed messages over how to jump-start his stalled agenda, according to multiple sources familiar with the talks.

The context: In recent weeks, as action on key Democratic priorities has languished in Congress, progressives as well as some senior party leaders have pushed the president to more liberally use his pen to sidestep Congress and take executive actions to enact key campaign promises on everything from immigration to climate to student loans. 

But that proposed strategy has caused heartburn among other Democrats, who worry about the potential for political blowback — not to mention concerns about those policies being rolled back the minute a Republican president is sworn in.

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Raghu Manavalan is the Host of POLITICO's Playbook.
Jenny Ament is the Executive Producer of POLITICO Audio.

All signs point to a typical midterm election this year in which the president’s party suffers double-digit losses in the House. The GOP has the big structural advantages on its side: a Democratic president with low approval ratings, a sour public mood driven by inflation concerns and an edge in polling on issues like crime, education and immigration that are proving important to voters in the crucial swing suburbs where the midterms will be decided.

One of the few ways Republicans could potentially blow this electoral equivalent of a layup is if former President Donald Trump suddenly returns to center court. 

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Raghu Manavalan is the Host of POLITICO's Playbook.
Jenny Ament is the Executive Producer of POLITICO Audio.

Democrats and advocates for the care economy are preparing for another uphill fight over spending for child care and pre-kindergarten.

 A letter being circulated by Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) and Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Tina Smith (D-Minn.) and obtained by Playbook will call on President Joe Biden to push a reconciliation bill “that lowers the cost of child care for families, expands access to pre-K, and invests in the early childhood workforce and infrastructure.” 

Enter Sen. Joe Manchin.

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Raghu Manavalan is the Host of POLITICO's Playbook.
Jenny Ament is the Executive Producer of POLITICO Audio.

We’ll have a lot more on the new Biden budget this afternoon and Tuesday. But here are some highlights of the framing from a White House official:

— Three big things. “The President’s Budget will reflect three important values: fiscal responsibility, safety and security at home and abroad, and a commitment to building a better America.”

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Raghu Manavalan is the Host of POLITICO's Playbook.
Jenny Ament is the Executive Producer of POLITICO Audio.

We have long been avid readers of the deep-dive political memos written by Doug Sosnik, a former senior adviser to then-President Bill Clinton. 

Sosnik’s latest is a very thorough 14-page dissection of the new politics of America’s suburbs. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the midterms in 2022 and presidential politics in 2024.

“The suburbs,” Sosnik writes, “are the last remaining competitive areas left in the country.”

Listen to Playbook Deep Dive: The man in Blinken's ear: State's Derek Chollet on Ukraine

Raghu Manavalan is the Host of POLITICO's Playbook.
Jenny Ament is the Executive Producer of POLITICO Audio.