The chief: Insider Ron Klain is back atop Biden World

Ron Klain, the longtime aide President-elect Joe Biden picked as his White House chief of staff, knows that “cocaine monkeys” unlock tax cuts.

That’s just old-fashioned Washington horse-trading, a reflection of the dealmaking he helped foster during the Barack Obama era and just what he and his new boss hope to do with congressional Republicans during the post-Donald Trump era.

Mr Klain is known as a problem-solving realist in a party increasingly pushed to the left by hard-charging progressives. His ties to the party’s progressive wing do not appear that strong, meaning he will have to extend olive branches to liberal Democratic lawmakers who on Thursday demanded “payback” from the incoming administration for helping get Mr Biden elected.

The graduate of Georgetown and Harvard universities clearly has the trust of the president-elect. But like many professional and personal relationships, the two have had their rough patches.

One came in 2015, when Mr Klain left the then-vice president’s orbit to work for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. “It’s been a little hard for me to play such a role in the Biden demise,” he wrote in an email to then-Clinton campaign chair John Podesta just one week before his longtime boss decided against seeking the Democratic Party’s 2016 nomination.

In fact, Mr Klain falsely diagnosed himself as excommunicated from Mr Biden’s inner circle. “I am definitely dead to them – but I’m glad to be on Team HRC,” he wrote to Mr Podesta.

His return and subsequent rise to the top of Biden World reportedly came after much flattery for Mr Biden, including a slew of fawning tweets – showing, once again, that in Washington a knack for playing the inside game still can trump perceived acts of disloyalty.

Now back as the president-elect’s right-hand man, Mr Klain is expected to try helping Mr Biden hold off and placate the progressives when it comes time to strike deals with Republicans. He learned a few lessons while a senior adviser to both Mr Obama and then-Vice President Biden, including as the 44th president’s pointman for a massive recovery bill that came in response to the 2008 economic crisis.

Even as some Republican senators voted for the measure – and insisted on pricey things to be included – they joined the rest of their party in attacking it.

“The Republicans say: See? Classic government waste!” Mr Klain told one interviewer. “Well, Specter was the 60th flipping vote! Without cocaine monkeys, there’s no tax cuts and no roads!”

He was referring to Republicans of that era calling the recovery legislation overly wasteful, a classic example of government pork. It included tens of millions for federal studies, including one that examined how monkeys handle cocaine.

Mr Klain got a Master’s level course in GOP unity and messaging back then, and will bring those experiences to work each day as White House chief of staff.

“Unless Democrats manage to win both Senate runoff elections in Georgia, Joe Biden will enter office without both houses of Congress under the control of his party – the first time this has happened in more than three decades. Even if he tries, he cannot enact into law the most ambitious and left-leaning portions of the Democratic agenda,” said William Galston, a former Clinton White House official. “Given this hard reality, the quest for legislative compromise is likely to dominate his administration from its earliest days.”

“Mr Biden must hope that he can restore the working relationship he had with Mitch McConnell during their years in the Senate and through much of Barack Obama’s presidency,” added Galston, now with the nonpartisan Brookings Institution. “If the Senate Majority leader is willing to meet him halfway, some progress on urgent national problems will be possible. If not, gridlock and drift will dominate, and the country will continue to lose ground at home and abroad.”

Mr Galston also praised his “wealth of relevant experience, including dealing with a prior pandemic, and his affable but businesslike temperament, which helps him say ‘no’ when necessary – a huge part of every chief of staff's job – without antagonizing people unduly”.

But like the president-elect, he has been out of government since January 2017. Since, the Democratic Party has changed, as the duo found during the party’s primary and general election. It has moved to the left, with a young class of progressives making demands almost daily of their new standard bearer, Mr Biden.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday called the incoming team “decent, kind, and honourable”.  But she also made a promise that also was a warning to Mr Biden and his soon-to-be chief of staff: "I don’t want anyone here to think we are not winning. We are winning. We are going to secure the tenets of a Green New Deal.”

While Ms Ocasio-Cortez and the young progressives often seem starry-eyed and not yet bruised by a few legislative fights and losses, Mr Klain is seen as a grounded veteran with that signature Washington cynicism.

“The political theory was if you do the right thing, and you get results, that’s good politics,” he said after the Obama administration lost the messaging war on the economic recovery bill. “In retrospect, it just seems stupid.”

More experienced congressional progressives, however, have been less inclined to pressure Mr Biden and team as they prepare to take over. Some give Mr Klain high marks.

“@RonaldKlain is a superb choice for Chief of Staff. He understands the magnitude of the health and economic crisis and he has the experience to lead this next administration through it. Ron has earned trust all across the entire Democratic Party,” Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren tweeted.

He is seen as a bridge to that older class of liberal lawmakers.

“Klain is a smart choice. His biggest asset is he enjoys the confidence of the new president. Klain is a Washington insider but he has good relationships with progressive Democrats like Senator Elizabeth Warren,” said one strategist who has worked with Mr Klain. 

Mr Biden’s calculus for selecting Mr Klain was trust. But when he takes over the large chief’s office suite near the Oval Office in just over 60 days, it will instal a longtime disciple of the Clintons back in the White House just as some political analysts have wondered aloud if the power couple’s hold over their party is waning.

The incoming chief joined Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, and went on to be the lead official handling the 42nd president’s judicial nominations. He was placed in charge of leading the team that shepherded the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s nomination through the Senate.

A Harvard-educated lawyer, he did a stint as then-Attorney General Janet Reno’s counselor and chief of staff. He did enough in those positions to impress senior Clinton administration officials, and was installed as then-Vice President Al Gore’s chief of staff in 1995.

His time working for the ambitious and suspicious Mr Gore was somewhat mired by worries in Gore World that he was too loyal to the Clintons – even sent over by them to keep an eye on a VP who made clear he wanted to be president one day.

Those worries from the vice president’s other senior staffers boiled over when Mr Gore, during Mr Clinton’s second term, launched his own presidential bid. Mr Klain was pushed out as the two camps clashed, but not for long.

His skills were tapped by Mr Gore during the 2000 Florida election drama, when Mr Gore brought him back as head of his recount committee.

That role gave him new cache in Washington even though Mr Gore’s efforts to secure the Sunshine State and presidency were unsuccessful, and also provides ample irony that he is assuming one of the capital’s most powerful jobs as a Republican president is waging a so-far unsuccessful effort to challenge the results of this election.

The 2000 recount made him something of an expert in the limits of an election challenge, as Mr Gore eventually gave up his legal fight.

“I think we’re seeing the kinds of stunts we expected,” Mr Klain said this week. “But Donald Trump doesn’t get to decide if Joe Biden is president or not. The American people decided.”