“There’s this whole attitude of, ‘You’re not my boss’ now. “I may work for you, but I have my own opinions,” said longtime Democratic strategist James Carville, who worked for former President Bill Clinton as a top campaign strategist. “If you said you didn’t like some of President Clinton’s policies, the idea of making them public would be insane. I just wouldn’t do that. It wouldn’t even occur to you.
In the past, it was extremely rare for White House officials to attempt to influence their own boss by publicly revealing internal disagreement over principles within his administration — at least without first resigning.
Leaks to the press from administration officials have been a hallmark of political journalism for generations. And during the George W. Bush years, top White House aides sometimes expressed their disagreements publicly. But that was only after they left their jobs.
“The deal a staffer made was always: You get to influence the decisions of the most powerful government in the history of the world,” said Paul Begala, who worked alongside Carville in the White House from Clinton. “In exchange for this influence, you agree to support the final decision even if it goes against your advice. If faced with a decision that crosses ethical, moral, social and political boundaries, the choice is clear: keep silent and support it, or resign.”
Things have changed more recently. Under the Trump presidency, unauthorized leaks have become a form of political currency, with anonymous officials writing op-eds and wild dramatic episodes regularly finding their way into the news.
Within the current White House, there is a sense that the culture has now irrevocably changed. Aides’ biggest frustration tends to be the outsized coverage of anonymous letters and criticism compared to official support for the president’s policies.
“This president…does not shy away from criticism. We’re not afraid to subject our policy choices to scrutiny,” a Biden aide, who was granted anonymity to speak about internal discussions, told POLITICO. “Even anonymous campaign staffers said they were doing this because they had so much respect for him. That says a lot.
But some White House officials said they also found the current internal divisions confusing. The tactic of going public with the matter, even anonymously, is not one that actually works with Biden and his brain trust.
“What they don’t know is Joe Biden and it doesn’t work on him. It’s not an effective way to get his attention,” said a former senior White House official who requested anonymity to speak freely about the president’s actions. “Staffers who believe that writing letters or resigning and doing an interview with Joy Reid will put pressure on the White House – it only makes the president himself more reluctant to engage and his advisers more reluctant to engage, but the direct conversation was effective.”
For a younger generation of activists, this type of analysis seems terribly outdated. In college and afterward, they participated in rallies during a time of mass protests against gun violence, women’s rights and police brutality – during which political debates were often directly influenced by vocal pressure. Whether this comes from external actors or internal actors is largely irrelevant.
“More Gen Zers are seeing the use of political power, whereas I’m not sure millennials have even seen the use of it,” said John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Institute of Politics from the Harvard Kennedy School. “Millennials worked outside of current systems, this generation seems determined to work inside and outside the system. And maybe that’s the difference today for my friends and colleagues who have been in the system serving, you know, elected leaders for many years now.
And young people have also adopted a mentality that the places where they shop, eat and work reflect an extension of their own morals. “Everything is an extension of their values. We once lived in an era where as consumers voted, now it’s the other way around. Voters consume. And you carry that with you on an ongoing basis, based on how others are treated,” Della Volpe added.
One of these new generation activists, David Hogg, a gun control advocate and survivor of the mass high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, argued that part of the change was due to the way whose information is disseminated. The Biden
campaign workers who recently published an anonymous letter protester did so by publishing it on Medium. Others wishing to express their discomfort with the war have many avenues through various other social media platforms. This created a new mentality, he noted.
“Our media ecosystem has been democratized with the creation of social media over the last fifteen years,” noted Hogg. “This type of decentralization or democratization of the media ecosystem has created a generational norm of not caring about hierarchy or who is necessarily above you.”
The White House, for its part, has convened multiple meetings with relevant staff and outside advocates since the start of the Israeli invasion, with high-ranking aides and the president himself. Jeff Zients, the White House chief of staff, held a listening session with senior officials and “Muslim, Arab and Palestinian staffers to hear directly,” a White House official told POLITICO. He also asked cabinet secretaries to ensure they also reach out to staff from the Palestinian, Arab American and Muslim communities.
According to former Biden aides in contact with the White House, these meetings helped influence the administration’s change in tone toward the Palestinians. They also allowed frustrated employees to vent.
“The meetings were the right thing to do. (The White House) may have underestimated that these meetings would be sufficient,” the former senior adviser said. “I also think that the people in the meeting may have overestimated how quickly their conversations and concerns would turn into U.S. government policy.”
Lauren Egan contributed to this report.