A crowd of women who marched to Joe Biden’s front gate on Saturday found themselves dismissed as “out of step” by the president’s top spokeswoman while battling unpredictable DC summer weather.
While frustration grows on the left about the administration’s response (or lack thereof) to the end of federal protections for abortion rights, the Women’s March returned to the nation’s capitol this weekend and staged a sit-in out front of the White House. While organisers asked for volunteers in the days leading up to the event to risk arrest, no actual arrests were reported on Saturday.
With turnout likely dulled due to a storm that broke out late Saturday morning before making a reappearance later in the day, more than a thousand demonstrators marched along the National Mall past the Washington monument before ending their march at Mr Biden’s residence. Despite rain beginning in the late afternoon, a few hundred remained to hold a sit-in outside of the fence before dispersing into the evening.
But it was clear that their pleas for Mr Biden to take further action — such as opening abortion clinics on federal land, or further working to pressure holdout senators on the fillibuster — fell on mostly deaf ears. While marchers were in the streets of DC the White House released a statement through outgoing communications director Kate Bedingfield that uncharacteristically tore into “activists” while giving no mention to the anti-abortion right or Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices who face accusations of lying to the Senate during their confirmation hearing process.
“The president has been showing his deep outrage as an American and executing his bold plan — which is the product of months of hard work — ever since this decision was handed down,” said Ms Bedingfield.
“Joe Biden’s goal in responding to Dobbs is not to satisfy some activists who have been consistently out of step with the mainstream of the Democratic Party. It’s to deliver help to women who are in danger and assemble a broad-based coalition to defend a woman’s right to choose now, just as he assembled such a coalition to win during the 2020 campaign,” she continued.
The reaction to her words among Democrats was instantaneous. Mr Biden’s team was excoriated on social media by everyone from the head of the Women’s March to the director of Spiderman: Into the Spider-verse, nearly all of whom were questioning why the president would attack his own base over the furor when Democrats are supposedly trying to weaponise that same anger at the ballot box in November in the hopes of adding to their 50-50 Senate majority.
Joe Biden “needs to use the bully pulpit for women rights, not against women’s groups,” wrote Rachel O’Leary Carmona, executive director of the March, who changed her Twitter display name to read “Some Out of Touch Activist” on Saturday after the statement was released.
Retweeting former Ohio state Sen Nina Turner, who wrote that “I don’t think a Democratic President should talk down about abortion activists right after Roe was overturned,” Ms O’Leary Carmona added: “Especially while [8,000] of them are right outside your house.”
Democratic strategist Atima Omara noted that the Democratic Party’s 2020 campaign platform had affirmed that the party would do everything in its power to protect abortion rights.
“What has been asked of the [White House] has been nothing short of what was affirmed in the platform which is to oppose and fight against laws that create barriers to reproductive health and rights. They don’t have to use all the ideas, but they don’t have to slam the folks asking,” she wrote.
Matt McDermott, a Democratic pollster, added: “This is a wildly tone deaf response, and it’s frankly stunning that it was approved by a Democratic White House for release.”
“It is remarkably concerning that there are members of the Biden Administration who seem more frustrated at pro choice activists than at Republicans who systematically dismantled abortion rights,” he added.
As the scathing reactions rolled in it was clear that Mr Biden’s comms director, who just confirmed her plans to exit the administration last week, had gotten the president into hot water with nothing to show for it; if the moment was an attempt to broaden Mr Biden’s appeal to conservatives or independents, there was little sign of them listening.
It was even eliciting reactions from progressives on Capitol Hill, who were openly grumbling about the president’s ongoing messaging troubles.
“Here’s a radical idea: How about we attack the six extremist justices on the court as out of touch instead of attacking the most passionate grassroots activists in our own party,” tweeted Rep Ro Khanna.
It remains unclear what the White House sought to gain from the statement, which came as abortion rights activists and progressives were publicly questioning why the administration appeared, according to most available reporting, to have been caught totally flat-footed by the Court’s decision despite it being leaked publicly months earlier. The statement on Saturday only added ammunition to the claim from the most cynical people on the left that Democrats don’t really care or at least aren’t willing to take actual actions to protect abortion rights while being content to campaign and fundraise off of fears and anger resulting from shrinking access to care.
“There is a reason she is leaving the White House,” one Democratic strategist quipped of Ms Bedingfield to The Independent.
By Sunday the West Wing was already running damage control. In a statement to pool reporters traveling with him in Rehoboth, Delaware the president himself urged protesters to keep fighting, though he didn’t address those who were lobbying him specifically to act.
“Keep protesting. Keep making your point. It’s critically important. We can do a lot of things to accommodate the rights of women. In the meantime, fundamentally, the only way to change this is to have a national law that reinstates Roe vs Wade,” said the president.
But he added: “As president I don’t have the authority to say that we’re going to reinstate Roe v Wade as the law of the land... My ultimate goal is to reinstate Roe v Wade as a national law by passing a law through the United States Congress, and I’ll sign it.”
New polling indicated that abortion rights are rising in importance in terms of what issues are driving voters to the polls this November; the issue now tracks just behind gun violence and the inflation-plagued economy in a Gallup survey. But it’s unclear whether it will be enough to boost Democrats to victory and allow the party to keep its House majority while expanding its caucus in the Senate.
Some recent developments including the apparent collapse of Herschel Walker’s campaign in Georgia have given Democrats reason to have hope for the midterms, but the party remains burdened by concerns about Mr Biden’s leadership at the top. Not helping the situation is the continued split personality of the White House’s communications team, which now seems to alternate between the president’s own views and the bash-the-base instincts of career officials who make up the day-to-day face of the administration.
If Democrats want to secure those majorities in November, it may very well end up being the job of Mr Biden’s next communications director to repair the vitriol that their predecessor hurled over the fence at rain-soaked marchers and rebuild the trust between the Democratic Party’s leaders and their base.
