Former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s new memoir, Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines, has landed with a thud in at least one prominent media outlet — and the criticism is aimed not only at the book, but at the political instincts it represents.
In a caustic review earlier this month, The Washington Post’s Becca Rothfeld argued that Jean-Pierre “may represent the future of the Democratic Party, despite her notional disavowal of it,” yet suggested that this supposed future looks remarkably uninspired. The reviewer charged that while Jean-Pierre loudly proclaims her independence from Democrats “in a futile effort to cleanse herself of the taint of her party,” she nevertheless ends up “espousing the same old worldview in the same old tired tone.”
Jean-Pierre devotes significant portions of her book to lambasting Democrats for what she views as a betrayal of President Joe Biden. She sharply questions why party leaders did not automatically unite behind Vice President Kamala Harris as Biden’s successor. But the critique, Rothfeld noted, never confronts “the rather central question of whether she was actually electable.” More striking still, the former press secretary reportedly concedes she “never really believed Harris could win.”
Rothfeld’s review takes particular aim at the cultural and political style Jean-Pierre embodies. She describes her as “an artifact of an age that looks recent on paper but feels prehistoric in practice — the age of pantsuits, the word ‘empowerment,’ the musical Hamilton, the cheap therapeutic entreaties to ‘work on yourself’ and ‘lean in’ to various corporate abysses.” According to Rothfeld, Jean-Pierre’s writing operates in an “outmoded register” — a polished but hollow rhetoric that, in her view, has been failing Democrats since 2016.
That critique extends beyond mere style. Rothfeld argues it is “incredible — and emblematic of the Democrats’ total aesthetic and intellectual driftlessness — that someone who writes in such feel-good, thought-repelling clichés was hired to communicate with the nation from its highest podium.” The review depicts Jean-Pierre as “revealingly blinkered,” seemingly out of touch with the frustrations driving American voters away from the Democratic Party in record numbers.
“[L]ike her colleagues in the halls of Congress,” Rothfeld observes, Jean-Pierre “appears to have little authentic understanding of why her erstwhile party’s approval rating has cratered.” The implication is that the Democratic Party continues to recycle the same messaging and the same messengers — even as its electoral challenges deepen — rather than grappling honestly with voter dissatisfaction.
Rothfeld concludes that there is one potential benefit to Jean-Pierre’s memoir: “The silver lining is that she has provided an object lesson in exactly what not to do.” The remaining question — and one Rothfeld leaves ominously open — is “whether the Democrats are capable of learning from her example.”
In her attempt to position herself as a critic from within the tent, Jean-Pierre may instead have offered critics outside that tent fresh evidence of a party struggling not only to persuade, but to understand why it must.
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