While this is nominally an account of past events, I can’t in good conscience place a book-tour piece in U.S. News.
When CJ Cregg exits the White House for the last time, a passing tourist asks her if she works there. “No,” she replies in the final episode of The West Wing, “No, I’m sorry I don’t.” The former press secretary casts a wistful glance back at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, knowing life will never be the same.
The evanescence of power is now familiar to Karine Jean-Pierre, who in real life served as White House press secretary for two and a half years under the presidency of Joe Biden. She was the first Black person, first openly gay person and – born in the Caribbean to Haitian parents – first immigrant to hold the title.
But the old saying that all political lives end in failure applies to their spokespeople too. Jean-Pierre spent her final months in the West Wing parrying questions about Biden’s mental acuity, an exercise that increasingly came to be seen as defending the indefensible. She watched as her boss’s legacy was undone, his numerous accomplishments eclipsed by his failure to prevent the return of Donald Trump.
That the whole experience ended on a sour note is made clear by the publication of Jean-Pierre’s memoir Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines. Its front cover offers an image of the White House, seen not through Cregg’s rose-tinted gaze but rather a cracked lens.
Her surprise over people having concerns over Biden and not blindly backing him are kind of telling…
Maybe he should have stepped back sooner.
Like, we have the knowledge of looking back now and given his cancer diagnosis, seems like that was the correct decision.
He should have done what he claimed in 2020: been a caretaker president to avoid more Trump and helped build the next generation of Democratic leaders. A robust primary would likely have avoided this Schweinerei.