Meet the REAL Deep State Hand of the King and PotUS!

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The name’s Klain — President Klain. Washington insiders delight in assigning the White House chief of staff this mischievous title as the driving force behind the actual president, Joe Biden. The man himself, Ron Klain, would never describe himself this way, but his firm grip on the levers of government has enabled the 78-year-old president to cruise through his first 100 days in office without breaking sweat.

Everybody who is anybody in Washington knows Klain, although few people outside the Beltway — the ring road surrounding the capital — have heard of him. He is a powerful, confident operator who knows the business of government inside out. Trusted to exercise power and take decisions, he keeps his boss informed while lifting the burden of office from him.

Klain, 59, has recently emerged from the shadows as the surprising face of the administration on Twitter, where he touts Biden’s achievements with gusto under the handle @WHCOS, for White House chief of staff. His output is very different in style to Donald Trump’s but equally triumphal. Among his latest tweets was a Reuters/Ipsos poll showing 55 per cent of Americans approved of Biden’s job performance, as opposed to 38 per cent who disapproved. He also highlighted a Washington Post article headlined: “No wonder the president has a bounce in his step.”

That bounce, such as it is, is down to Klain, the ultimate enabler. For those who find the scale of Biden’s colossal $6 trillion spending plans hard to square with the moderate politician who has been knocking around Washington for half a century, look no further than “President Klain”. He is determined to secure Biden’s place in the pantheon of presidents, with Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, who built the American welfare state.

Having achieved his life’s ambition by reaching the White House, Biden’s goal is to remain in office as long as possible — two terms, preferably. This means he is “pacing himself” in the job, as a seasoned official told me wryly.

The president’s address to Congress last week, in which he unveiled the third tranche of his stimulus package — the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan — was delivered at 9pm to reach West Coast viewers. That is late for him. Most days, Biden works from 9am until 6pm or 7pm, before retiring to his private quarters. His wife, Jill, whom he gallantly presented with a dandelion on the White House lawn on Friday, also makes sure he gets plenty of rest.

Weekends are often spent in Delaware, to which he flies on Air Force One (a smaller plane than the usual wide-bodied jet, as the runway is too short). “The president lives in Wilmington. It’s his home. That’s where he’s lived for many years,” the White House press secretary said recently.

Biden is letting his team take the strain, and that is how they like it. “There is nothing wrong with delegating. It’s a lesson the Democrats should have learnt from Ronald Reagan,” a former White House official told me. The president is served by an inner cadre of half a dozen officials who know him backwards. “The price of entry into this club is a minimum of ten years working with Joe Biden,” he added.

At its apex is Klain, a Harvard law graduate who was clerking at the Supreme Court when he joined Biden’s first presidential campaign in 1988 as a junior speechwriter. A year later Klain became chief counsel to the Senate judiciary committee, then chaired by Biden. A former colleague recalled his appointment raising eyebrows. “I see you’ve just hired a 27-year-old,” a fellow senator chided Biden. “Well, I can remind you I was elected a senator at 29,” Biden retorted.

Since then, the two men have been virtually inseparable. “Even when Ron was off the staff, if Biden was doing one of the Sunday television shows he would have a pre-call with Ron about what he should say,” the same colleague told me.

Klain is not just Biden’s “brain” but has spent more time than his boss in government. He served four years as chief of staff to Al Gore, Bill Clinton’s vice-president, before taking on the same role for Biden when Barack Obama became president. Only once did he fall out with the Biden camp, when he joined Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election campaign without consulting him.

“I’m dead to them,” Klain wrote in an email disclosed by WikiLeaks during the huge document dump that helped to seal Donald Trump’s victory. Yet he was soon back in favour. His expertise in government, knowledge of arm-twisting in Congress and skills as a lobbyist proved too valuable.

Klain was not only the “ebola tsar” under Obama — a useful primer for handling the Covid-19 pandemic — but did a lot of the heavy lifting when Obama appointed Biden “stimulus sheriff” after the 2008 financial crash. Klain’s wife, Monica Medina, is a climate change expert who has just been nominated to a top oceans, environment and science job at the State Department.

Beating the pandemic, stimulating the economy, taking climate change seriously — these are all Biden administration priorities. In particular, Klain has thrown his weight behind the “go big” spendathon that has come to define Biden’s first 100 days. Klain describes the task as “rebuilding the backbone of the country, rebuilding the soul of the country”.

Biden has won applause on the left for the return of big government after decades of bending the knee to Reaganomics. Yet it is not only Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary under Obama, who is raising the alarm about the “substantial risk” of inflation. A former colleague and admirer of Klain told me he had only one downside: “Ron is so smart he doesn’t understand when he is wrong.”

A lot is riding on the success of Biden’s stimulus and infrastructure plans, not least the fortunes of the Democratic Party in the midterm elections next year. So far his policies are proving popular, although he is on the defensive over immigration and “woke” cultural wars. But plenty of moderate Democrats are concerned that he is betting the farm on progressive policies in a divided nation for which the party has no mandate.

Biden, they thought, was on their side, as was his White House chief of staff. What happened? Klain has argued that nobody should be surprised by the president’s boldness. “He laid this out in pretty elaborate, often mind-numbing detail over the course of the campaign — very detailed policy papers and very long speeches,” Klain was quoted as saying in The Wall Street Journal last week. “Everything we are doing is what we said we were going to do.”

Yet the point is that Biden was not expected to deliver on all those promises. They were devised as a “peace treaty” with Bernie Sanders, his rival for the Democratic nomination, who had a huge number of die-hard supporters on the left whom Biden needed to rally behind his own candidacy (after all the damage they caused Hillary Clinton). Once in government, the policies were supposed to be safely trimmed or dropped.

Six “unity task forces” were set up, covering the economy, climate change, health, education, immigration and criminal justice reform. When the economic plan was released without much fanfare in July, a senior campaign aide described it as the “largest mobilisation of public investments in procurement, infrastructure and [research and development] since the Second World War.”

If anybody read this statement, they did not believe it. Even the new left, led by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has been surprised by the scale of Biden’s ambition.

What some of these trillions will be spent on remains anyone’s guess. Sharp observers have noticed that Brian Deese — the “infrastructure guy” in charge of the National Economic Council — recently talked on a New York Times podcast about “shovel-worthy” rather than “shovel-ready” projects that have yet to be determined.

Klain believes the impressive degree of unity forged in the Democratic Party can be replicated in the country at large. But are former Republican and independent suburban voters who helped to secure Biden’s victory ready to endorse the biggest left-wing experiment for decades?

In the words of his former colleague: “You’ve got to assume Ron’s doing a very good job. He understands government as well as anybody.” Others are adopting the brace position. Either way, Biden has a remarkably dedicated wingman.