WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden’s White House communications director and senior adviser Ben LaBolt, a suburban LaGrange native, will be one of last staffers out the door on Monday, working until noon when Donald Trump is inaugurated.
LaBolt has been in this post for almost two years and when he winds up his tenure he will have traveled with Biden to 15 countries and 29 states — including 16 times to Pennsylvania.
The job has been “a daily intensive effort to tackle the big challenges facing the country and the world,” LaBolt said when we talked for this exit interview. “And it involved things like going into Tel Aviv just over a week after Oct. 7 and having to figure out how to get the president into a conflict zone that American troops don’t control and briefing the press on what do if a rocket attack happens when we’re on the ground.”
LaBolt, 43, a 1999 graduate of Lyons Township High School in LaGrange, is winding up this latest chapter in a career where he’s handled communications for Biden, former President Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel, when he first ran for Chicago mayor in 2011.
We met in 2005, when he started as a press secretary for Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill. LaBolt got a leg in the door when he interned for Schakowsky after his freshman year at Middlebury College. He remembered that in our first encounter, we were outside the Capitol at an event with Illinois members and he handed me a press release — and I told him I was not going to use it.
As a kid he took classes at The Players Workshop (originally The Players Workshop of The Second City) and did some improv in college. That training, LaBolt said “helps in every job…because it’s about preparing for the unexpected and rolling with it.”
LaBolt got that unexpected early morning call on New Year’s Day after a man in New Orleans drove his pickup truck into a crowd on Bourbon Street, killing 14 people. LaBolt immediately started working on the White House response. Then came the Los Angeles wild fires, scrambling the plans for Biden’s final weeks in office, packed with legacy speeches and what would have Biden’s the last foreign trip, to Rome to see Pope Francis at the Vatican, canceled because of the blazes. And hours before Biden’s farewell address on Wednesday night, the president was addressing the nation to announce the Hamas-Israel ceasefire/hostage release deal.
Said LaBolt, “You really have to be ready for anything to happen any day, no matter what your proactive plan.”
The following are edited excerpts from our conversation:
Compare, contrast the communication styles of Biden, Obama and Emanuel:
“With Obama, I would say narrative and personal. With Rahm, I would say staccato and short lists, everything being a list of three.” Biden is “rooted in his personal and family narrative… he doesn’t stick to the script. He likes to tell stories.”
On the challenge of getting Biden’s positive economic message out:
“Information consumption has changed. It’s really diffuse. We know that, for example, the 20 million Americans that watch the network evening news every night, who tend to be 65 and older, were very aware of everything that the president did and accomplished and very supportive of the president.
“But there’s more than 300 million Americans, and so you have to go everywhere to get your message out. The president did. He did lots of podcasts and lots of engagements with digital creators and influencers. We hosted them here at the White House, but the average interview just isn’t seen or consumed by that many people.
“And so that’s an increasing challenge of these jobs. He went out there, traveled states across the country to talk about, all the significant achievements in terms of allowing Medicare to negotiate down the cost of prescription drugs and cap the annual out of pocket on prescription drugs to $2,000 a year, and bring home industries that were thriving overseas, such as clean energy and semiconductors. And to revive manufacturing and reverse the trend where manufacturing was going offshore. He communicated about those things pretty much every single day.”
“What he said is that he took on long term challenges and many of those things, those factories will be built, infrastructure will be rebuilt over the course of years. It’s not immediate. So I think people will really see the dividends of this administration for decades to come. But you know that was those are not things that are felt immediately, because they take time to implement.”
Biden’s messaging on multiple platforms:
“ The job of communications director is really to direct the orchestra, and it’s got to rely on all sorts of different platforms and means of communicating. You’ve got to produce and put out your own, your own content and videos.
“You’ve got to put the president out and on television. You’ve got to put him out on radio and on streaming audio. You’ve got to have him engage with YouTube shows and creators and influencers. You know, he still does print. He still does, a number of the legacy media outlets, but you’ve got to flood the zone, and you have to do it that keeps in mind the diverse ways in which people across the country receive their information.”
Things that stand out:
“There were all sorts of things that I was a part of in this job that stand out. Some of it was just, fun, light engagements and appearances that went a long way, like the president’s appearance on Seth Meyers’ earlier this year.
“Some of it was historic, like being able to go to the 80th anniversary of D-Day this year, which may be one of the last times that the veterans who served there could participate. And helping to structure the events and interviews around that, as the president went and visited the American cemetery and ceremonies there.
“Some of it was making sure that we had effective crisis response, whether it was hurricanes or fires or terrorist attacks, that the team was always ready to go and was always ready to communicate the round the clock effort that the president and the Homeland Security team was leading to respond to events in real time and make sure people knew the government was working for them.”
“So there’s, there are a number of things that will stand out….working for a president who has been doing this for a long time, who’s got a close relationship with so many leaders on the Hill and in foreign capitals around the world, and learning from him was a real privilege as well.”
What’s next:
LaBolt was a partner at Bully Pulpit International and living in San Francisco when he joined the Biden administration. His dad lives in Edgewater on Chicago’s North Side with a brother in LaGrange. Said LaBolt, “I’m still figuring out next steps.”