Over the last year, both President Biden’s and Vice President Harris’ communication teams have seen a spate of departures, including some senior-level members. Though anonymous sources claim that this is just part of the “natural” turnover cycle for White House employees, others have said that it might be burnout, personality conflicts with their coworkers, or worse – an apparent lack of concern from their bosses about coherent messaging strategies as they enter into the 2022 midterm election campaign season.
“His messaging has been awful,” one Democratic strategist said to The Hill. “It’s terrible. There’s no way around it.”
Biden’s top communications official, Kate Bedingfield, the latest member of Team Biden/Harris to announce she’ll be leaving is on her way out. Despite not having issued an official statement yet, multiple reports indicate that Bedingfield has informed several people within her inner circle that she will leave.
Bedingfield’s apparent exit comes just four months after reports suggested that the Biden communications staff and the Harris communications team were at loggerheads, with Biden’s people reportedly dissatisfied with the vice president’s inability to properly execute the responsibilities assigned to her by Joe Biden, and Harris’ camp believing that Biden’s team takes pleasure in blaming his numerous shortcomings on her.
In a private conversation, Bedingfield was reported to have remarked that Harris’s complaints were “irrelevant,” adding fuel to the already-roaring divisions between the two sides.
“KATE BEDINGFIELD, the comms director for Biden, not only grew weary of the criticism that the White House was mishandling Harris — she also blamed the vice president,” according to the book.
According to Martin and Burns, “Bedingfield had begun privately commenting on how the vice presidency wasn’t the only time in Harris’s political career that she had failed to live up to extremely-high expectations: Her Senate office was a disaster, and her presidential campaign was a failure. Perhaps it was not the vice president’s team at fault, after all,” she pondered.
