Does Joe Have A Strategy?

The usual suspects had the usual headlines just before the holiday, like NBC News's White House ramps up war room to battle expected GOP impeachment inquiry, which several outlets repeated verbatim. NBC continued,

The White House has stood up a war room of two dozen lawyers, legislative aides and communications staffers to lead an aggressive response to a likely Republican impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, a White House aide familiar with the strategy said.

The effort, as described by eight people familiar with the plans, has been taking shape for months in the White House counsel’s office as part of the response to Republican-led House investigations. Biden's aides and allies say they are preparing to vigorously push back against an impeachment inquiry and present it as an evidence-free partisan sham that shows a GOP penchant for chaos.

Insofar as the Biden camp has teased a potential strategy, it seems to go like this, father down in the story:

Biden aides have looked to 1998, when the House impeached President Bill Clinton, as a model for how to mount an effective defense — and make the GOP pay a political price for overreaching — said a source familiar with the strategy.

Clinton enjoyed his highest approval rating — 73% — in December 1998 when House Republicans were considering articles of impeachment, according to the Gallup Poll’s historical data of Clinton’s presidency. Biden’s predecessor and potential 2024 election opponent, former President Donald Trump, similarly got a boost around his first of two impeachments. Trump had the highest approval rating of his presidency — 47% — in February 2020 as the Senate prepared to acquit him.

But this isn't a strategy. I'd say it mostly just looks back at prior impeachments with an implicit recognition that it's much easier to get an impeachment vote in the House than it is to get a conviction in the Senate, while even an impeachment vote in the House will rally supporters of the current president -- but this is a short-term effect. Dubya still ran on Monica Lewinsky in 2000 to beat Clinton's designated successor in the narrowest of elections, and Biden implicitly ran on Trump's 2019 impeachment to win in 2020.

If the Biden war room's strategy is just to look at history, well then, if history is any guide, Joe will survive an impeachment by the House to be acquitted in the Senate before the 2024 election, and he may even get a temporary bump in the polls, but an impeachment hangover will linger into the election itself, and he'll lose in 2024. So that strategy isn't a strategy. So far, it looks like Joe has no plan but to react to events as they come up. For instance, over the weekend,

Unprompted, Biden approached reporters Sunday in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, after he went to Mass at St. Edmond Roman Catholic Church to say he was not on vacation.

“I have no home to go to,” said Biden, who lives at the White House on weekdays and spends most weekends in Delaware, where he has two homes.

The U.S. Secret Service has been doing work on his longtime primary residence in Wilmington, Delaware, to make it more secure “in a good way,” he said.

It has been at least a few months since he last spent a night there.

“So I have no place to go when I come to Delaware, except here, right now,” he said, speaking of his other home, in Rehoboth Beach. “I’m only here for one day.”

In fact, the Secret Service has been building enhancements at both Biden homes in Delaware, including a roughly $400,000 extension of the wall around his beach house. But all this does is call attention to the ongoing complaint that Joe's on permanent vacation simply by having him deny it, while it also raises the possibility that he's aggrandizing himself with permanent home remodel projects.

What I can only infer from this episode is that Joe's handlers were off duty for the holiday, or if they weren't, they may as well have been. What he did on Sunday, was to wander over to reporters so he could go off script and call attention, first, to the appearance that he's permanently at the beach, and second, he's having his home permanently remodeled on the taxpayers' dime. There's no plan, no goal, no discipline just Caesar's whim.

In contrast, Bill Clinton had a much clearer strategy in 1998-99. This 2019 piece by David Frum in The Atlantic describes it pretty well, I think:

1. Don’t be defined by impeachment. . . . [M]ost of the time, the president took pains to show himself as engaged in anything and everything else. Message: The Republicans are obsessed with my sex life; I am focused on my job.

2. Express contrition for proven wrongdoing. After Clinton’s early denials of a relationship with the intern Monica Lewinsky were exposed as false, he expressed contrition for his offenses while arguing that impeachment represented an excessive response. “I don’t think there is a fancy way to say that I have sinned,” he declared at the White House prayer breakfast on September 11, 1998. “It is important to me that everybody who has been hurt know that the sorrow I feel is genuine: first and most important, my family; also my friends, my staff, my Cabinet, Monica Lewinsky and her family, and the American people. I have asked all for their forgiveness.”

3. Leave no fingerprints on any countermeasures. Through 1998, one Clinton accuser after another was felled or tainted by damaging revelations of sexual scandal: House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his would-be successor, Robert Livingston; House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde. . . . Despite ample speculation that the White House political operation was somehow involved, nobody could ever prove a link.

4. Persuade the waverers. [T]he Clinton impeachment strategy was not focused on his superfans. . . . It was focused on that famous 1990s demographic bloc, the soccer moms: women who disapproved of Clinton’s character, but liked Clinton’s economy. The strategy for 1998 and ’99 always kept these waverers uppermost in mind, again and again offering them a middle way: Condemn Clinton and move on.

5. Never read the stage directions aloud. As the House of Representatives neared the end of its impeachment debate, December 16, Clinton launched Operation Desert Fox against Iraq. . . . Clinton skeptics wondered whether the timing was a coincidence. White House officials insisted otherwise, and not a word was ever said or written to prove them wrong.

Realize that Frum wrote this in 2019, before the idea of impeaching Joe was even a glimmer in anyone's eye. Yet so far it looks as if Joe is working hard to violate every Clinton tactic. Joe simply isn't engaged, he's either at the beach or jetting around to meet world leaders in trivial photo ops. Clinton was able to manage the Lewinsky scandal in several effective ways: once he was forced to 'fess up, he could compartmentalize it into a single past episode for which he could cloyingly beg forgiveness while insisting it was a minor transgression in the scheme of things.

Joe, on the other hand, has a repeating pattern visible over years of collecting payments from foreign entities via Hunter and his partners to enrich himself and his family in return for influencing US policy on the foreign entities' behalf. Unlike Clinton, Joe and his handlerd can't compartmentalize this pattern into a single episode and apologize for it. Instead, at least for now, they're just insisting there's no evidence, while new evidence neverthelss comes out almost daily.

And Joe's fingerprints so far are all over his countermeasures. For instance,

According to recent reporting, Jay Bratt—a Department of Justice employee and top aide to Special Counsel Jack Smith—met with White House officials multiple times, just weeks before Mr. Smith indicted former President Donald Trump.

And of course, Joe is already notorious for reading stage directions aloud off his teleprompter. For instance,

It is noteworthy that the percentage of women who register to vote and cast a ballot is consistently higher than the percentage of the men who do so – end of quote. Repeat the line.

There are differences in Clinton's and Biden's circumstances, especially since Clinton wasn't up for reelection in 2020, while Joe is up in 2024, so we simply don't know whether Clinton's tactics could have saved his electoral chances. But without the 22nd Amendment to the US Constitution, which limits presidents to two terms, it's conceivable that Clinton, still young and popular, could have made it to a third term in spite of the Lewinsky scandal, which he and his handlers kept from metastisizing, and in hindsight, they did ths with some skill.

Joe, in contrast, is up for a second term with his age and condition already working against him. In addition, his potential defenses are more limited. These include continuting to insist there's no evidence that he and Hunter worked together, but that's a tougher and tougher sell. Another would be that the bribery in question occurred during his time as vice president, and he can't be impeached for that now, but that assumes Joe isn't currently on the take, which could collapse at any time.

In any case, so far, even with a White House impeachment war room ramping up, we aren't seeing any signs of an effective strategy for Joe, especially to put the whole issue behind him for 2024 even if he'll probably be acquitted in the Senate. I have a sense that the old Clinton team has been distancing themselves from Joe for quite a while.