Several people are tackling the task of managing President Joe Biden’s social media accounts, according to a report.
CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere penned an article titled, “Beneath Biden’s struggle to break through is a deeper dysfunction among White House aides.”
The piece details the struggles White House aides are having with Biden’s messaging.
Dovere pointed out the aides “largely started working together only through Zoom screens and still struggle to get in rhythm.”
He noted Biden “is a 79-year-old man who still thinks in terms of newspaper front pages and primetime TV programs, surrounded by not-quite-as-senior aides in senior positions with the same late 1990s media diet.”
One person familiar with Biden’s thinking told CNN, “A speech is presidential, remarks are presidential. His view is if he can just explain to people what’s going on and why, that people will understand.”
According to Dovere, “Older aides dismiss the younger aides as being too caught up in the tweet-by-tweet thinking they say lost the 2020 election for everyone else.”
The report continues, “Younger aides give up — what’s the point of working up innovative ideas, they ask themselves, if the ideas constantly get knocked down and the aides get looked down on for suggesting them?”
White House spokesman Andrew Bates responded to a question about Biden’s older media habits, mentioning the “weekly time set aside on the President’s schedule for creating digital content and the over 70 people on staff who help create it and manage his various accounts, as well as two interviews in the past few months with online-only creators.”
Bates explained, “The President has a well-rounded strategy that combines putting unprecedented resources into digital engagement, speeches that provide many of his most powerful moments, and person-to-person interactions that showcase important qualities like his empathy.”
Earlier this year, White House chief of staff Ron Klain proposed “to have Biden do one town hall each month to at least grab some unscripted moments and media exposure.”
Dovere reported that the plan “got sucked into the maw of blaming and dysfunction like so much else: Some aides embraced the idea for at least shaking things up a little, some mocked it for being an outdated idea, some complained that the logistics of making that happen would be impossibly time consuming.”
The piece goes on to point out not a single town hall was scheduled.
A White House aide suggested more town halls can be expected in the near future.
