Who is running the Biden administration?

Is it Joe Biden? Maybe, but many question whether he has the mental capacity and the energy to run the show.

In this post about the Biden administration’s early hard-left initiatives, I speculated that Susan Rice, Ron Klain, or some combination of the two are determining Biden’s domestic policy agenda under pressure from the left. On the foreign policy side, no known policy has yet emerged about which to speculate.

Ric Grenell, who until recently was the acting DNI, believes that Rice is dictating both domestic and foreign policy. Rice is Biden’s White House Domestic Policy Council director, so domestic policy falls under her jurisdiction. Rice’s experience, however, is in the areas of foreign policy and national security. Thus, it’s plausible to believe that she is a major player in these areas, as well.

Given Rice’s lack of experience and expertise in domestic policy, what I wonder is whom she is looking to for guidance in this area. She may be looking to her former boss, Barack Obama.

Rice isn’t the only candidate for power behind the throne. Many assumed that Vice President Kamala Harris would run the show for Biden. Grenell doesn’t think so. He says that Harris “needs to spend most of her time in the Senate because it’s. . .50-50.”

I very much doubt that Harris is too bogged down in the Senate to have a major hand in setting White House policy. Her problem, I suspect, is that she isn’t sufficiently respected by Biden and his team to be a key player. If so, the lack of respect is well earned.

In the end, I don’t think it matters much whether Rice, Harris, Klain, or Biden himself is deciding the course of the new administration’s domestic policy. The real source of that policy will be the hard left.

Why? Because adhering to the hard left’s agenda will be the path of least resistance for whoever at the White House makes the call. And because no one with influence at the White House is likely to be put off by that agenda.

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