Karine Jean-Pierre — who her predecessor Jen Psaki admitted was a diversity hire as she passed the propaganda torch to her — never answers the question asked unless the answer matches what her handlers have pre-written on her notecards, which she can barely read anyway.
To be overly charitable, she is transparently, objectively not good at her job. I have literally seen toddlers as eloquent. Presumably, her handlers have tried to remedy her reading issues to apparently no avail.
The only reason that the White House Press Corps hasn’t mutinied yet, aside from being generally compliant lapdogs to power, when KJP gives non-answer after non-answer — and condescendingly so, which only has the effect of highlighting her incompetence rather than the apparent intended effect of portraying competence — is that she is a sacred Person of Color™ as well as a lesbian and immigrant, a trifecta of diversity that makes her untouchable.
Related: KJP vs. English: White House Diversity Hire’s Reading Problem
Doubtless, White House senior staff have quietly mulled removing her from her post since she is a daily embarrassment, but they suffer from what might be called the Kamala Dilemma: doing so would trigger a veritable firestorm from progressive media that would immediately denounce whoever fired her as a Deplorable bigot.
So they’re left to make lemonades out of lemon, as it were, which includes laundering her very unpalatable image through the corporate state media, the Democrat Party’s de facto PR machine.
And thus we get this abomination, via Vogue:
In 2020 [KJP] joined the Biden campaign as a senior adviser and later became Harris’s chief of staff. About a year and a half into the Biden presidency, she was introduced as the White House press secretary — the first Black person and first openly gay person to hold the position.
Vogue dove headfirst into the identity politics game in literally the second paragraph. Credit where credit is due, though: I would have guessed that would’ve been front and center in the very first sentence.
Related: White House Revises Press Rules, Shields Karine Jean-Pierre From Hard Questions
Continuing:
Directness—blunt, with a touch of compassion—is Jean-Pierre’s currency at the briefing podium. She meets the White House press corps almost daily—favoring bright colors and bold eye shadow when she does—and, while she’s more reserved than some of her predecessors and less likely to respond to provocation with a social media–ready retort, she has sharpened her own technique: disarm with a smile, then lay out the facts at hand…
Jean-Pierre studied under the urban policy expert* Ester Fuchs, PhD, whose class told a narrative of American progress. “The view essentially was, ‘Okay, our institutions work,’ ” Fuchs says. Jean-Pierre—one of two Black women in the course—wasn’t so sure. “She asked the hard questions,” Fuchs says. “Her concern was always for what we call the promise of America. She believed in it, but she saw where it wasn’t working.”
Jean-Pierre came to understand politics as a remedy. After graduation, she worked for New York City Council members. In 2007 she headed for North Carolina to work for presidential candidate John Edwards and met Jen O’Malley Dillon, his deputy campaign manager. When Edwards’s run imploded, O’Malley Dillon moved to Barack Obama’s staff and offered Jean-Pierre a job.
*What exactly is an “urban policy expert,” and why the obliqueness? Most race-hustling professions are much more straightforward in their monikers these days.
Continuing (skipping over volume-length fluff):
Jean-Pierre did get a lot of criticism, especially in the beginning. There were reportedly complaints from the press corps, who sniped about Jean-Pierre’s recitation of talking points and expressed genuine exasperation about her perceived stonewalling on basic questions. Things became particularly testy in early 2023 when Jean-Pierre was pressed on a cache of classified documents found at Biden’s Delaware home. She seemed to share incomplete information from the podium—so much so that NPR reporter Tamara Keith, who was then president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, questioned Jean-Pierre’s ability to do her job. “Are you upset that you came out to this podium…with incomplete and inaccurate information?” Keith asked. “And are you concerned that it affects your credibility up here?”…
The alternate view is that Jean-Pierre can only say as much as the White House counsel allows her to. “I take none of it personally,” is all Jean-Pierre will tell me, when I ask her about the attacks on her credibility. “I’m representing the president, so petty is just not on the menu.” She adds (and reporters I speak to confirm) that she has developed good personal relationships with many correspondents—even those with whom she has “intense back-and-forths,” as she puts it…
Recently, a cabinet member texted Jean-Pierre. (She declines to say which.) This official had been getting pilloried in the press, and Jean-Pierre had offered a strong defense from the podium. “They reached out to me and thanked me,” she says. “I was like, ‘That’s nice. You’re welcome.’ ”
Who does that for her? Her team, she says. She has champions outside the White House too. When a group of Black women came to see Harris not long ago, one of them sought out Jean-Pierre to say that “there are millions of us who want you to succeed.”
There are of course also millions who do not.
“Millions of racists” is the obvious insinuation.
Continuing:
Fox News is obsessively covering a change in Jean-Pierre’s word choice regarding whether or not President Biden was involved with his son Hunter’s business dealings. Where once the line was that Biden had “never spoken” about foreign deals with Hunter, Jean-Pierre now tells reporters Hunter and his father were never “in business” together. Other reporters (like The New York Times’ Peter Baker) note the shift as well.
Jean-Pierre reminds me that she’s not speaking for herself at the podium. That’s as true when questions about Hunter arise as it is when she has to respond to geopolitical human rights issues that target LGBTQ+ communities. She cites Haiti’s descent into political chaos as an example of where she must hold her feelings back. It’s “one of the issues that’s toughest for me,” she says.
She knows that what she represents is part of why Biden chose her for this role. But letting her own opinions slip into the record “is not what I signed up for,” she says. “I signed up to speak on behalf of this president. That’s why he selected me”…
The film director Gina Prince-Bythewood, who met Jean-Pierre at an event honoring Black women across industries earlier this year, says she too is struck by Jean-Pierre’s grace: “When you’re the first, you need to do well for yourself, but you also have to do well for all those who want to come up after you. If you mess up, people judge a whole community based on your actions.”
Jean-Pierre gets at the same idea, obliquely. We’re talking about the criticism that has dogged Harris—whispers about staff turnover, a bedeviling policy portfolio. “It’s hard to be the first,” she says of her former boss. “There is always going to be criticism. You’re always going to be under a bigger microscope.”
“Men can get away with all kinds of personalities doing this job,” Fuchs tells me. “Most of them are crude and rude. Karine had to develop something different. And she did. She developed this steely personality with a big smile, and that’s her armor.
As predicted, Vogue hit the “men get away with being mean” talking point, the “LGBTQ+++™ representation” talking point, and the “black women are targeted unfairly” talking point while refusing to touch any of the substantive criticism of KJP with a ten-foot pole.
