Delaware is starting to get jealous

Feb 28, 2023

Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from Allie Bice.

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Traveling to Ukraine in secret a week ago required President JOE BIDEN to depart from Joint Base Andrews in the dead of night. It required a stop-over in Germany, before flying on to the southeasternmost airport in Poland. From there, it required a 10-hour train ride to Kyiv.

But when the president travels domestically, the White House commonly looks much closer to home.

On Tuesday, Biden’s event on health care access took place in Virginia Beach. Flight time from Andrews: 28 minutes. On Wednesday, he’ll make his third trip of the year to Maryland, where he’ll speak at a House Democratic retreat in Baltimore.

Biden was just in Lanham, Md., at a union hall on Feb. 15 for a White House event focused on economic issues. Two weeks before that, when the president sought out a location to highlight infrastructure improvements, he turned to a railway tunnel in Baltimore. Last August, when Biden needed a location for his first campaign rally with Democrats, it took place in Montgomery County, on the other side of Washington.

“You wouldn't consider that a battle ground. It's the bluest of blue areas,” said MICHAEL RICCI, former communications director for then-Maryland Gov. LARRY HOGAN, a Republican.

Maryland is not unaccustomed to presidential visits, given its proximity to Washington, and because Walter Reed Medical Center and the National Institute for Health are based there. At this point in their presidencies, DONALD TRUMP had visited Maryland 11 times and BARACK OBAMA 16 times (once to watch his daughter play basketball). But the frequency of Biden’s visits is unique. Wednesday’s trip will be his 22nd trip to Maryland since taking office — and the president wasn’t traveling much at all during his first year because of Covid. Besides Delaware, where the president spends most weekends at home, the only state he’s gone to as much is Virginia.

“We certainly noticed [the number of visits],” Ricci said. “But we also figured that Maryland just checked a lot of boxes for them without the demands of long travel."

That’s essentially the administration’s calculation, people familiar with White House travel and operations confirmed. While Biden has also made a point of traveling to a number of swing states outside the Acela corridor, keeping the president’s trips close by is largely about scheduling and minimizing the time he and top aides are away from the White House.

Being off campus for longer periods often has the effect of separating the president and senior aides from their teams back in Washington and slowing things down, these people said. With shorter trips, Biden can work all morning at the White House and not leave until midday — which was the case Tuesday — or the afternoon.

The White House has often prioritized efficiency over political calculations: since taking office, Biden has traveled just once to Arizona and Nevada, two states that helped him win the presidency in 2020 and will be crucial to a reelection bid in 2024. Conversely, he’s visited North Carolina, where campaign aides have been reluctant to invest heavily, four times.

And Biden has taken 22 trips to Pennsylvania, another key battleground that happens to be a stone’s throw from his Wilmington home in Delaware.

Biden has taken 14 trips already this year, including two that took him out of the country. By comparison, Obama had taken 10 trips — all of them domestic — at this point during his third year in office. One additional trip in the works for Biden, to Michigan the week before he traveled to Ukraine and Poland, was ultimately scrubbed, according to people familiar with the matter.

Biden is also expected to travel abroad in the coming months to Canada, Asia and possibly Africa and again to Europe.

One administration official pointed to Biden’s scheduled travel this weekend to Selma, Ala., to mark the anniversary of “Bloody Sunday.” The official said political expediency is often a small piece of travel considerations that more broadly reflect Biden’s stated goal of being a president “for all Americans.”

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POTUS PUZZLER

This one is from Allie. What has been the most common name among U.S. presidents?

(Answer at the bottom.)

The Oval

THOSE 2011 VIBES: After two years of advocating for spending programs to boost the economy, the president is trying out a new persona: deficit hawk. Our ADAM CANCRYN reports that ahead of an expected reelection campaign, the president has been touting a $1.7 trillion decrease in the deficit and is expected to call for $2 trillion in cuts over a decade in next week’s budget proposal.

(ENDLESS) 8TH AVENUE HEARTACHE: The New York Times Guild sent members an update Monday on contract talks with the company, expressing frustration with management’s refusal to budge on increasing base salaries for the newsroom. So what’s next? A bullet point at the bottom of the email seemed to imply a strike could be in the offing. “Remember: Every major concession we’ve gotten so far — retaining the pension, increasing fertility benefits, basing raises on real salaries instead of guild minimums — has followed collective action,” it read.

Last summer, members wrote letters to the masthead. In December, most took part in a one-day walkout. Now, with talks at a standstill, a strike may be all that’s left. But it’s not clear if the Guild could get enough members to authorize such a move, especially after alienating much of the newsroom earlier this month by joining in criticism over the paper’s coverage of transgender issues.

I’LL HAVE WHAT SHE’S HAVING: Apparently, Washington is still talking about the Bidens ordering the same entree at Red Hen two weekends back. As the WaPo's EMILY HEIL patiently explains in this survey of local attitudes on the subject, you would be naturally and rightly inclined to order the rigatoni even if your spouse was also getting the rigatoni because everyone gets that rigatoni. If you don’t get it, well, you just don’t get it.

WHAT THE WHITE HOUSE WANTS YOU TO READ: This breakdown of Biden’s messaging strategy by WaPo’s MATT VISER as the president travels to, yes, Virginia and Maryland this week. The president plans “to mount a vigorous defense of his health-care policies as he ramps up criticism of Republican proposals that he argues could threaten the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid,” Viser writes. “Biden’s attempt to focus on health-care coverage is the next front in an ongoing debate he has been having with Republicans — one that broke into the open most publicly during his State of the Union address.” White House deputy press secretary ANDREW BATES tweeted out the piece Tuesday morning.

WHAT THE WHITE HOUSE DOESN’T WANT YOU TO READ: This opinion piece by NYT’s ANA MARIE COX about how the president’s son, HUNTER BIDEN, “has some explaining to do. … As wild as the accusations against him are, the one nugget of irreducible truth is Hunter Biden’s privilege. It has served him as a just-about-literal get-out-of-jail-free pass. The same is true for countless other politicians’ kids — certainly including Donald Trump’s. But pointing out the double standard won’t be enough to defang Republican criticism. And neither will just waiting for it all to blow over.”

THE BUREAUCRATS

Julie Su

Biden announced he would nominate Julie Su to be his next Labor secretary. | AP Photo/Alex Brandon

BUT DOES SHE RUN ON DUNKIN? Biden nominated Deputy Labor Secretary JULIE SU today to succeed her boss, MARTY WALSH, who is leaving to lead the professional hockey players’ union. Our BURGESS EVERETT, NICHOLAS WU and SARAH FERRIS broke the news. They note that Su’s path to getting Senate confirmation may be a rocky one — she was confirmed for her current role in a 50-47 vote in 2021.

PERSONNEL MATTERS: SCOTT DE LA VEGA is now general counsel at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He most recently was associate solicitor for general law at the Interior Department.

ANDREA S. YOUNG is now counsel to FEC Chair DARA LINDENBAUM. She was most recently a Voter Protection advisor at the DSCC and is a Biden-Harris Campaign, DNC, and Democratic Party of Georgia alum.

Agenda Setting

NOT SO FAST: The Supreme Court on Tuesday appeared skeptical of the Biden administration’s legal authority to cancel student loan debt, one of the president’s signature policies that he campaigned on during the midterm elections. In the first of two oral arguments, conservative justices questioned whether Biden had the authority to cancel student debt without authorization from Congress. They also probed the fairness of providing loan forgiveness for some types of debt but not others.

The court isn’t expected to issue its opinion until May or June, but student debt relief advocates are already pressuring the Biden administration to come up with a Plan B. The White House, for now, is projecting confidence. “We’re focused on ‘Plan A’ because we’re confident in our legal authority,” principal deputy press secretary OLIVIA DALTON told reporters traveling Tuesday on Air Force One.

KEEPING COLORADO SPACEY: Colorado lawmakers are lobbying the Biden administration to keep the U.S. Space Command from relocating to Alabama. Sen. MICHAEL BENNET has even argued that moving the force from a blue to red state will limit members’ LGBTQ rights and abortion access, our CONNOR O’BRIEN and LEE HUDSON report.

What We're Reading

Biden Administration Asks Congress to Reauthorize Warrantless Surveillance Law (NYT’s Charlie Savage)

Biden sketching dire picture of GOP desire to cut spending (AP’s Colleen Long and Josh Boak)

On immigration, why is Biden resurrecting Trump policies? (WaPo’s Catherine Rampell)

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POTUS PUZZLER ANSWER

JAMES is the most common name for the U.S. presidents, with six of them having that name, according to Statista — JAMES MADISON, JAMES MONROE, JAMES POLK, JAMES BUCHANAN, JAMES GARFIELD and JAMES “JIMMY” CARTER.

We’re patiently waiting for the President Sam ____ boomlet.

A CALL OUT — Do you think you have a harder trivia question? Send us your best one about the presidents with a citation and we may feature it.

Edited by Eun Kyung Kim and Sam Stein.

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