Ms. O’Malley Dillon, the White House deputy chief of staff, said Mr. Biden was maintaining an aggressive schedule. “Whether it was in Kyiv, barnstorming the country highlighting the manufacturing jobs he’s bringing back, averting international crises in the wee hours of the morning like he did in Bali or putting Republicans on defense over Social Security in the State of the Union, the American people and the world see his qualified leadership,” she said, “and younger aides have to push themselves to keep up with that pace.”
Republicans have steadily hammered Mr. Biden’s mental and physical state, and are already trying to transform any Rose Garden-based approach into a liability. “He’s going to be Biden in the basement again,” Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chairwoman, predicted on Fox News last week.
The Biden operation has taken steps to signal a coming bid, like announcing a “national advisory board” of influential Democratic leaders last month in The Washington Post. But some of the elected officials who were named as top Biden surrogates on the board found out about their involvement in such a council only when reading about it, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. There have been no communications to the full advisory board since its creation.
In Washington, speculation has raged about who will serve as campaign manager, with an approved short list of Democratic operatives circulating for potential senior roles. Yet not all of the people on that list have had substantive contact with top Biden officials this year.
Michael LaRosa, a former adviser to Jill Biden, the first lady, said power would inevitably be centralized at the White House regardless of the location of the campaign’s headquarters — Wilmington, Del., is favored but Philadelphia has also been under consideration — or the person named as campaign manager.
“The person who is going to be running the campaign is going to be taking orders from the West Wing,” Mr. LaRosa said. He described Mike Donilon, Ms. Dunn, Ms. O’Malley Dillon, Steve Ricchetti and Bruce Reed as “the five people who inform his decision making when it comes to anything on policy or politics.”
“And I don’t mean that in a disparaging way,” he added. “This president, like every president before him, has a small circle of trust who he seeks advice from.”
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