White House officials do damage control over Biden’s blame shift: “Context is important”

by mcardinal

Lauren Moye, FISM News

 

On Monday, President Joe Biden acknowledged “there is no Federal solution” to COVID-19 during a meeting with National Governors Association. Now, the White House is attempting to do damage control amid a fresh outcry against federal vaccine mandates in light of the President’s statement.

The official Biden-Harris White House Twitter account posted exclusively on COVID-19 yesterday, making four tweets within a three-hour period before falling silent. This included a reminder of the importance of vaccinations, how the federal government is “making sure states have what they need to tackle COVID,” and two previous video statements from Biden.

The caption on the last video tweet touts being “the full clip of [Biden]’s statement yesterday” as if the full statement somehow changes the fact that Biden’s stance has changed dramatically since he boldly declared that he would “shut down the virus” while on the campaign trail last year.

As FISM previously reported, Biden’s full statement shows his softening stance towards a federal response to COVID-19. When Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson requested that the federal government not hinder states’ efforts to provide COVID solutions, the president responded by saying, “There is no federal solution. This gets solved at the state level.”

That didn’t stop White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki from attempting to wave the problem away by retweeting Monday’s full statement with the attached statement, “Sometimes context and the full clip is important (or almost all the time).”

White House Chief of Staff Robert Klain also jumped in on the misdirection with an onslaught of social media activity. This included a retweet of Left Anchor Podcast Producer Ryan Cooper’s opinion that “an anti-vax, anti-mask conservative is not a reliable video editor, it turns out.” 

This statement is a thinly veiled attempt to reframe Biden’s disastrous statement as a dishonorable attack promoted by a social outlier. However, when states’ rights and citizens’ livelihoods are being impacted by federal vaccine mandates, it is the full statement that remains the problem. U.S. representatives and senators pointed this out by responding with simple statements:

Amid fresh outcries for the mandates to be rescinded, the damage control effort by the White House is at full tilt.

Rassmussen’s daily presidential poll shows that only 41% of Americans approve of the president’s job performance, while 58% disaprove. Of those who disapprove, 48% say they strongly disapprove. With the spread of COVID and corresponding mitigation measures being a top issue for a large number of Americans, Biden’s team has continually tried to “manage” Biden’s talking points and appearances.

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