As Jazz pointed out this morning, Mayor Eric Adams has become the tip of the spear when it comes to elected Democrats trying to deal with the influx of migrants at the border. And that role has put Adams at odds with President Biden and the White House. In fact, Adams criticism led to his being dropped as a Biden campaign surrogate sometime last week. That’s not a minor issue given that Adams is the most high profile black mayor in the US.

Adams has used some pretty tough language about the White House. In April he said, “The president and the White House have failed this city,” Later in the same speech he added, “Enough is enough. New Yorkers deserve better from our national government.”

Today, Axios has a story about the divide between Adams and the White House which notes that there are many other Democrats who quietly agree with his criticisms of the Biden administration.

This isn’t merely personal. It’s part of a potential crisis for the campaign: Many Democratic state and city officials quietly agree with Adams and are happy he is taking flack on their behalf.

They’re running out of patience with the administration — especially over what they see as a lack of financial support or imminent solutions for dealing with the massive migration across the Southwest border.

One senior official in a Democrat-led state said the White House has been too defensive toward Adams’ critiques. “Adams is right to be upset, and I think it’s a massive mistake to be dismissive of him,” the Democrat said.

So there’s a genuine divide in the party which could be a big problem for Biden’s re-election campaign if it continues like this. That has many Democrats eager to see Biden and Adams patch up this divide.

Top Democrats are trying to repair the Biden-Adams relationship, thinking that the mayor continuing to hammer Biden throughout the 2024 campaign would be a drag on the president — and a boon to Republicans.

“I’m trying to get them to sort it out,” the Rev. Al Sharpton told Axios.

Sorting this out sounds nice but this is fundamentally not a personal or even a partisan disagreement, it’s a fight over money. Mayor Adams is seeing a $4 billion hole in his budget and he’s worried what comes next now that Title 42 has ended. I’m not sure how the divide can be repaired so long as the situation continues to get objectively worse.

I think that means the president is going to have to step up and offer some help if he wants to win Adams over, but he can’t really spend billions of dollars without congress. Could he sign an executive order allowing asylum seekers to work as Adams has suggested? I don’t know but I suspect someone in the White House has been looking at it.

The bottom line here is that Joe Biden would by more than happy to ignore these complaints if they were coming from Republicans in Texas or Florida. But thanks largely to Gov. Abbott, we’re now hearing the same kind of complaints from the Democratic Mayor of NYC. That’s a problem the White House probably didn’t see coming and for which it really has no solution.