Ron Klain: "Voters sent a message on Tuesday"
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Ron Klain. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday said President Biden's polling numbers have fallen after "a rough and tough year" that left many Americans "tired."
The big picture: Klain said Democrats losing the Virginia governorship last week was a message from voters, who want to "see more action in Washington," and that lawmakers responded by passing Biden's bipartisan infrastructure bill.
- Klain said Democrats would aim for passing the president's social spending package when Congress comes back from its Veterans Day break.
State of play: The administration is still buoyant after a report Friday showed the U.S. economy added 531,000 jobs last month in an apparent hiring rebound, and the unemployment rate came down to 4.6% — a new pandemic-era low.
What he's saying: "In my opinion, it's been a rough and tough year and we knew it would be," Klain said Sunday.
- "We're in a yearlong effort to dig out of the holes we were left. We inherited a debt economy, 50,000 jobs a month," he added. "We're now finally back to 500,000 jobs a month. We inherited a country where 4,000 people a day, 4,000 people a day were dying from COVID. That's now down 75%."
- "So I understand that voters are tired. Americans are tired of how long it's taken to get the economy moving, to get COVID under control. ... But I think what the American people are going to see is we have put in place the strategies, the actions to turn that around."
"[Voters] are in a show-me-don't-tell-me mode. I think we are going to show them in the weeks and months ahead that we have made this progress on COVID, we have made this progress on the economy. We are past now, the infrastructure bill."— Ron Klain on "Meet the Press"
