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A week that seemed at first to threaten Joe Biden’s legacy and the electoral chances of his designated successor instead ended with the president taking a metaphorical victory lap in the briefing room.
The dockworkers strike that endangered the country’s economy was settled Thursday night. And on Friday morning, at 8:30 a.m. on the dot, chief of staff Jeff Zients informed the senior aides gathering in his West Wing office for their daily morning meeting that the September jobs report beat expectations — by an astounding 100,000 jobs.
A White House facing three serious crises all week, suddenly, was mulling the best way for Biden to tout these successes. The president himself had recently expressed an eagerness to appear in the briefing room. And so when aides presented him with the option of doing so on Friday afternoon, he quickly agreed.
“We’ve proven them wrong,” the president crowed, after entering the room to audible gasps, during his 15 minutes at the podium.
He was referencing critics of the pandemic relief in the 2021 American Rescue Plan and putting his economic record in a broader context. “We’ve gone from an economy in crisis to literally having the strongest economy in the world,” he said.
That robust economy — and the avoiding of a prolonged work stoppage at ports that could have threatened it — offer lift for Vice President Kamala Harris as she enters the final weeks of an incredibly close presidential campaign. But Biden’s defiant triumphalism, just months after an intra-party revolt forced him to abandon his bid for a second term, was also a defense of his entire presidency.
“It really is a week where the president’s leadership, his experience and his steady hand drove strong results,” Zients said in an interview with West Wing Playbook.
This account of how the president and his team juggled the week’s various crises is based on conversations with four administration officials, who were granted anonymity to share previously unreported details about a frenetic but ultimately fruitful five days inside the West Wing.
Last week’s hurricane forced Biden to scrub two planned trips, one to Scranton, Pennsylvania, and another that would have taken him out west, in order to spend two days traveling to states where the damage was the heaviest. Biden, who started signing disaster declarations last week on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, has earned praise from Republican governors for his administration’s responsiveness.
At the same time as he was signing disaster declarations to get federal aid moving, he was keeping tabs on the combustible situation in the Middle East and the looming strike by the International Longshoremen’s Association that would shut down ports along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts.
The settlement, of course, is temporary, allowing the dockworkers until Jan. 15 to negotiate a new contract. And the Middle East remains a powder keg, with Biden’s diplomatic overtures to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failing to elicit a response. In two critical swing states where early voting is getting underway, recovery and cleanup efforts from Helene are likely to drag on for months. And it’s unlikely that another strong jobs report or Biden’s appearance in the briefing room will dramatically shift dour public opinion on the economy.
But inside a White House somewhat hollowed out by staffers departing for campaign jobs and beset by low morale among some after Biden’s departure from the campaign, two hard-earned wins served as validation for the president and his staff.
Biden, who made clear last weekend he wouldn’t intervene to settle a strike, called ILA leader Harold Daggett on Monday night to convey that he had workers’ backs, just as Zients and NEC director Lael Brainard were pushing the U.S. Maritime Alliance to put a better deal on the table.
On Tuesday, Biden and Harris spent several hours in the White House Situation Room, receiving updates from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and CENTCOM Commander Gen. Michael Kurilla, who briefed attendees as Iranian missiles struck Israel, noting how U.S. air defense was helping to minimize the impact. Biden, at various points, left the room for brief updates from aides monitoring the dockworkers’ strike. As he left the Situation Room, Biden also instructed aides to arrange a call with G-7 leaders for Wednesday morning to coordinate a joint response to any escalation in the Middle East.
That evening, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg spoke by phone with local officials in states impacted by Hurricane Helene who expressed concern that the dockworkers’ strike could further slow recovery efforts. When that was relayed to the president Wednesday morning, he became more “worked up,” according to one of the officials in close contact with the president.
A short while later, when Biden arrived at Joint Base Andrews, he made a point of speaking with reporters on the tarmac before boarding Air Force One to tour damage from what he said was an “incredibly consequential natural disaster” in North Carolina, before connecting it to the port strike. “We cannot afford a man-made disaster on top of a natural disaster,” he said.
With Biden away, Zients, Buttigieg, Brainard and Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su continued to coordinate efforts to resolve the strike. Following Biden’s support for workers’ right to collective bargaining and his public calls for global shipping conglomerates to share more of their huge profits, Zients wanted to arrange a Zoom call with the six global shipping CEOs, not simply U.S.-based executives, for 5:30 p.m. Wednesday.
When aides explained the complications of those CEOs being in different time zones, spread across Europe and Asia, plans were shuffled and a call was arranged for 5:30 a.m. Eastern Time on Thursday. As Zients and others outlined the potential impact from a prolonged strike on the call, the CEOs grew receptive to the White House’s proposal for a stopgap agreement and the parties agreed on a goal of resolving the strike by the end of the day.
Biden, who was briefed on the call before departing for a second day of surveying storm damage in Florida and Georgia, called back from the road throughout the day to ask where things stood. As he was wheels-up from Georgia and headed back to Washington, Zients informed him that he was “80 percent sure” a written agreement was about to be finalized.
And, in the end, it was.
