Give the White House at least this much credit — their circling back has gotten more efficient lately. Just a few days ago, Jen Psaki scoffed that voters had any real concerns over high crime rates and soft-on-crime policing and prosecution policies. “What does that even mean,” Psaki laughed, calling those issues only in a Fox News “alternate universe”:

Jen Psaki mocks people discussing the “consequences” of “soft-on-crime” policies: “What does that even mean?” pic.twitter.com/C1KEnXVIQI

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) January 31, 2022

As I pointed out at the time, the “alternate universe” of high-crime concerns didn’t just include Fox News but also CBS, CNN, and even the New York Times in just the week preceding Psaki’s scoffing. The NYT’s focus group consisted only of independent/moderate voters, who told Frank Luntz that rising violent crime rates were not just a concern but perhaps their top issue:

LUNTZ: … The people who were disappointed in him don’t hate him. He still has an opportunity to win people over. He still has an opportunity to transcend ideology, to transcend politics. But they look at their day-to-day lives and they don’t think that he’s helping them at all. And I’m listening every moment of the 90 minutes we had with them to hear something they embrace. Here’s something that they endorse, something that they support.

And I’d say if you did a content analysis, 75 minutes of the 90 were spent complaining and only 15 minutes were spent in support of anything. These people sounded tired. And it wasn’t the time that we did it at night. They’re just physically, intellectually, emotionally tired from the last two years. Covid never seems to end. Prices seem to get out of control. Shortages, a lot of them mentioned issues of crime. In fact, crime is more commonly mentioned than any other issue.

The last time Psaki scoffed at a pressing issue, it was about COVID-19 tests and the lack of supply for the widespread testing necessary to meet the demand that Joe Biden’s mandates would create. “Should we just send one to every American?” Psaki retorted sarcastically to Mara Liasson’s suggestion that Biden should honor his campaign pledge to make tests widely available. Two weeks later, the White House contradicted Psaki and announced plans to send at least four tests per household.

They’ve managed to shorten the Psaki-circle-back correction time to three days in this instance. Guess who’s suddenly interested in looking tough on crime?

New York City Mayor Eric Adams and President Joe Biden have taken wildly different paths to their current posts, but they sense a similarity in each other, and each man has decided to lean on the other as they chart out the tricky political terrain before them.

The president on Thursday will sit down with the man who has dubbed himself the “Biden of Brooklyn” to discuss an increase in violent crime that has jolted Democratic leaders in cities across the country. Adams first met the president last summer at a White House event with other leaders on crime. …

“[Biden] does not think the answer is to defund our police but it’s instead to give them the tools and the resources they need to be good partners, to be good protectors, to institute the needed reforms, so that they are able to build trust with the community [and] treat everyone with dignity and respect,” a senior administration official said on a call with reporters Wednesday evening ahead of Biden’s visit.

The trip comes after two NYPD officers were shot and killed, the latest in a spate of high-profile crimes in the city that also included a woman shoved to her death in front of a Times Square subway train. The senior administration official said Biden is going to New York to highlight the metropolis as a “great example” of a city successfully deploying a strategy to fight violent crime and “an example of why we need congressional funding.”

Biden and AG Merrick Garland want to use this to focus on gun control legislation, NBC reports, but that’s not much cover:

President Joe Biden on Thursday plans to join New York’s new Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, in offering what White House officials describe as a road map for crime messaging this year with Republicans set to spotlight the issue in the midterm elections.

Biden plans to emphasize both increased funding for law enforcement and aggressive enforcement of gun safety laws on Thursday’s trip, which marks his highest-profile effort to date to model the Democrats’ election-year balancing act of supporting law enforcement while also insisting on new police accountability.

The gun-control messaging is pretty ironic given the onerous gun-control laws already in place for both NYC and the state of New York. Even aside from that, though, the contradiction between Psaki’s response on Monday and the sudden need for “crime messaging” for the midterms is entirely damning of this White House’s messaging. It serves as a tacit admission that crime has become a massive problem both legally and politically, so much so that suggestions otherwise are the true “alternate universe.”

The tacitness of that admission may explain, however, why Biden’s more interested in messaging that having that messaging come under any real scrutiny. Time’s Molly Ball explains:

Apparently Joe Biden wants to be seen with Eric Adams so badly that the White House is…not letting the national media cover it!

— Molly Ball (@mollyesque) February 3, 2022

There was no credentialing for this event, @WhiteHouse just handpicked pre selected media outlets to cover it. Very cool, very transparency.

— Molly Ball (@mollyesque) February 3, 2022

This smells like a hastily arranged event intended as a clean-up over Psaki’s ludicrous response. And it’s hardly the first of these, and likely won’t be the last of them until the White House hires someone who doesn’t want to project like a character from Panem in The Hunger Games.

Update: Biden explicitly rejected “defund the police” while appearing with Adams, too:

“Mayor Adams, you and I agree, the answer is not to abandon our streets, that’s not the answer,” he said, referring to New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D).

“The answer is to come together, police and communities, building trust and making us all safer. The answer is not to defund the police, it’s to give you the tools, the training, the funding to be partners, to be protectors and the community needs you, know the community,” Biden added in remarks at One Police Plaza, the headquarters of the NYPD in Lower Manhattan. …

“We’re not about defunding, we’re about funding and providing the additional services you need beyond someone with a gun strapped to their shoulder,” he said.

The popping sound you hear could be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ mind being blown … or an intrusion of reality into Jen Psaki’s.