MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM: Bully pulpit no more - Jen Psaki's turn at the lectern
Sunday, Sept. 19, 2021 -- President Biden's press secretary has tamped down the vitriol that colored news briefings during the Trump administration. She still may not answer your question, though.
Posted — UpdatedJen Psaki, President Joe Biden’s press secretary, may be the most prominent spokeswoman in U.S. politics, but political fame hits differently in the post-Trump era.
But a cult of Psaki has proliferated online, where clips of her restrained, if occasionally withering, exchanges with reporters have established this once obscure political strategist as an unlikely cultural force. Her retorts earn “yas queen” praise from liberals, while conservatives jeer her attempts at spin, particularly over the past month, when the confluence of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, extreme weather and coronavirus confusion meant the questions were more pointed and the answers more scrutinized.
Psaki, 42, a veteran communications operative who was twice passed over for the top job under her previous boss, former President Barack Obama, is an unlikely avatar for the smack-down-happy, we-have-no-choice-but-to-stan culture of modern social media. A onetime competitive swimmer who grew up with a Republican father in Greenwich, Connecticut, she was until this past year barely recognized beyond the Beltway in-crowd, who knew her as a capable technocrat type with deep ties to Democratic leadership.
Another moment caught fire online this month, as Texas was passing a law that effectively banned abortion in the state. A reporter from a Catholic news service pressed Psaki on why Biden, a Catholic, supported abortion rights.
“He believes that it’s up to a woman to make those decisions with her doctor,” Psaki replied. “I know you’ve never faced those choices, nor have you ever been pregnant. But for women out there who have faced those choices, this is an incredibly difficult thing.”
Crisp and precise in her answers, even if she does not always respond directly to a reporter’s questions, Psaki, in her speaking style, is a contrast to Biden and his circuitous folksiness. In interviews, Washington correspondents often used the word “professional” — high praise in D.C. — to describe interactions with her, deeming her straightforward, detail-dense briefings a relief after an era in which former President Donald Trump’s press secretaries repeatedly insulted, denigrated and frequently ignored journalists.
To be fair, the bar may be rather low.
But even Doocy, whose profile has been raised by his tough questions to Psaki, offered generous words.
“It never feels like I’m getting smacked down or vice versa,” Doocy said in an interview, during which he expressed respect for Psaki’s professionalism and good humor about their frequent contretemps. “I understand why it looks like that, some of the ways that stuff gets clipped, but it doesn’t feel like that in the room.”
He said he appreciates her personal side, too. “When I got back from my wedding,” Doocy recalled, “she made a point to tell everybody in the briefing room that I just got married. That’s a transcript I can print out and show to my kids one day.”
She grew up in various neighborhoods in and around Greenwich, although Psaki describes her family as hailing from a less affluent background than that gilded locale suggests. Her mother, a psychotherapist, is socially liberal. Her father, a local real estate developer who once filed for bankruptcy, voted for Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush; he switched parties after his daughter went to work for Obama’s 2008 campaign.
Visitors to Psaki’s office will find a copy of the classic newspaper article “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus” hanging on a wall — “a reminder to believe in magical things,” Psaki tells friends. She keeps a makeup and hair kit beside her overstuffed, color-coded leather briefing book, a West Wing equivalent to George Costanza’s bulging wallet.
A New York Times crossword puzzle from 2017, which featured her name in a clue, “___ Psaki, White House communications director under Obama,” is framed above the fireplace. (That puzzle appeared on a Friday, the second hardest of the week; her name popped up again in a Sunday puzzle — the widest circulated — this past February, perhaps a sign of growing recognition.) Near the crossword is a photograph of Obama on his hands and knees in the Oval Office with her daughter, then an infant.
It was under Obama that Psaki rose to prominence, serving as traveling press secretary for his 2008 campaign, becoming chief spokeswoman for Secretary of State John Kerry, and eventually being named the White House communications director.
Still, she was twice passed over for press secretary — first in 2011 for Jay Carney, then in 2014 for Josh Earnest — an experience that Psaki recently said left her “devastated.”
“It was a tough moment in the administration,” Robert Gibbs, Obama’s first press secretary and a mentor of Psaki, said of the decision to go with Carney. “They probably just thought she was a little too young to handle some of that.”
David Axelrod, Obama’s senior strategist, recalled: “There was a recognition that she was incredibly talented, but a feeling that she could get more seasoning doing a stint at State.” Now, he says, “Jen is as good as anyone I have seen in all the years I’ve been watching this stuff.”
She prepared for her current job through a series of practice briefings held over Zoom last December and January, with Gibbs and the former Obama press aide Eric Schultz impersonating reporters. “I was the one who tried to be like the biggest jerk or whatever,” Gibbs said, though he declined to specify which White House correspondent inspired his performance. “You want to get pushed the most and see what happens.”
It was unusual, and highly deliberate, when Psaki staged her first formal briefing hours after Biden’s inauguration. Among her first words at the lectern was a pledge to tell the truth “even when it’s hard to hear.”
Not surprisingly, she has her share of detractors, especially on the right.
“I walked into the lion’s den every day — she walks into a bunch of kittens,” Sean Spicer, Trump’s first press secretary and now the 6 p.m. anchor on Newsmax, said in an interview.
“Jen chose to stand and question my qualifications and services to this country. Once she did that, the gloves were off,” Spicer said. (In 2017, when Spicer was roundly criticized for referring to Nazi death camps as “Holocaust centers,” Psaki was more magnanimous. “It’s a really tough job, everybody screws up,” she said on CNN at the time.)
Biden has urged Psaki to eschew acronyms and other governmental jargon, once chastising her for using the corporate term “R & D” — research and development — in a response. Unlike Trump, Biden does not usually watch briefings in real time, but he is known to catch snippets on cable news during the day when he has gaps in his schedule.
Biden is no one’s idea of a careful public speaker. (As Axelrod once put it, “He is not a precision instrument.”) Psaki’s primary task is to interpret and in some cases clean up his comments for the record, a responsibility that has been even tougher in recent weeks.
Rahm Emanuel, who worked with Psaki on Democratic campaigns and recommended her to the Obama team, said he texted Ronald Klain, Biden’s chief of staff, on the day her appointment was announced. “I said you’re going to count your blessings, in the days to come, that you made this decision,” he said. “You’re not going to have to worry about what goes on in that room.”
Psaki’s internet stardom is a far cry from a darker moment of online infamy she endured earlier in her career, which friends say she now credits for giving her tough skin.
In the early 2010s, while serving as Kerry’s press secretary, Psaki’s name and likeness became the subject of a widespread anti-American campaign on Russian state TV. A leading pro-Kremlin propagandist, Dmitry Kiselyov, used his television program to coin the verb “Psaki-ing”: meaning an American who is confused and unable to understand basic information about world affairs.
Some complaints from domestic critics are less about mental acuity and more about her approach to the briefings. “Rehearsed, scripted and boring,” Charlie Spiering, the White House correspondent for Breitbart News, wrote in an email.
For Psaki and her allies — who know the power of a certain bury-them-in-facts tedium — this may be more feature than bug. “You guys can be an ornery bunch, you know,” Axelrod said of the reporters who cover the White House. “She commands respect.”
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