Los Angeles Times: “It should have been the safest of political appearances — a group of kids gushing about their love of science and space exploration with Vice President Kamala Harris.”

“But for Harris, it became a controversy. The children, it turned out, were paid actors…”

“The fallout over the video, produced for YouTube’s original programming platform, is the second in recent weeks where a seemingly innocuous appearance by Harris has become modestly troublesome.”

Frank Bruni: “A seemingly infinite volume of words has been lavished on the fight between progressives and moderates in the Democratic Party, and that’s largely warranted. It’s a real battle. It’s a meaningful one. And the side that President Biden comes down on will certainly affect his and his party’s fortunes.”

“But there’s a larger issue — a question — that links those circumstances and overarches this perilous juncture in the first year of his first term. It, more than anything else, explains the plummet of his approval rating. It looms large for that small minority of voters without ironclad allegiances to either the Democratic or Republican parties.”

“They’re wondering this: Just how competent, really, is Biden? Just how knowledgeably and confidently in charge? I don’t mean neurologically, which I hasten to clarify, lest right-wingers suffering from Biden Derangement Syndrome disingenuously repurpose my comments. I mean administratively, legislatively, politically. And voters’ misgivings about that could be disastrous for him and for America — which cannot afford another go-round with Donald Trump or any of his coddlers — because they concern and corrode the very case that Biden made for his presidency.”

A new Morning Consult poll finds President Biden’s net approval rating is down 16 percentage points among unvaccinated Black voters since September 8, the day before he issued the vaccine mandates.

Punchbowl News: “We got a note this morning from a source close to the White House — someone who would be in position to know the Biden administration’s private thinking — that was meant as a warning shot to Democratic moderates and progressives on Capitol Hill bickering over the multi-trillion dollar legislation. The message is that it’s time to reach a compromise on the reconciliation package and send it to President Joe Biden — ASAP.”

“We’ve pointed this out before, but Democrats truly are nowhere when it comes to finishing this reconciliation package. The ‘serious progress’ that has been made is not really evident to us, or to the lawmakers involved.”

Jonathan Bernstein: “Presidents do have some options in such circumstances. They can generate media coverage for almost anything they want. They can persuade members of Congress to pay attention to something. They also have a variety of stuff they can attempt to exchange for votes — appointments, executive actions that help a district or a state, publicity for a given lawmaker, and so on.”

“But what presidents can’t do is order any member of Congress to agree. They can’t even enforce deadlines. And while applying pressure to reach a deal can help, it can also backfire. Publicity might generate pressure to compromise, but if lawmakers don’t hear from constituents, they may learn that the president is safe to ignore. High-profile negotiations and deadlines might force an issue, but can also make any impasse harder to break.”

A new Politico/Morning Consult poll finds just 38% of Americans think the country is headed in the right direction, while 62% think it’s headed in the wrong direction.

Also interesting: President Biden’s approval rate is 46% to 51%, but his favorability rating remains higher than every other national political figure tested.

A new CNN poll shows President Biden’s net approval is positive at 50% to 49%.

Ross Douthat: “One problem with the emergency thinking that Trump inspires in his opponents — and one reason to resist it — is that it occludes real understanding of the political conditions that put him in power, and that might do so again.”

“This is what you saw happen to the Democrats after 2016: The sense of being lightning-struck sent the center-left wandering into a maze of conspiracies, a haunted wood where villains like Vladimir Putin and Mark Zuckerberg loomed larger than the swing voters they had lost and savior figures like Robert Mueller were supposed to unmake Trump’s power for them.”

“Only the party’s left, its Bernie Sanders wing, fully developed a more normal theory of the 2016 defeat, trying to understand Obama-Trump voters in the context of globalization and deindustrialization as well as racism, fascism and Putinist dirty tricks.”

Although Douthat makes some good points, he also wrote just before the election that Trump would not make a coup attempt if he lost.

“The Biden administration urged the courts again to step in and suspend a new Texas law that has banned most abortions since early September, as clinics hundreds of miles away remain busy with Texas patients making long journeys to get care,” the AP reports.

The Atlantic: The post-Roe Abortion option no one knows about.

CBS News Poll: “Only 10% of Americans describe themselves as knowing a lot of specific things about what’s in the Build Back Better plan, and a majority admit to either not knowing specifics or anything at all.”

Washington Post: “This upcoming stretch may be Biden’s last chance to revive a presidency that has suffered major blows in recent months. Since being rocked by the Afghan withdrawal and the surging delta variant over the summer, Biden’s approval rating has fallen steadily, hitting a low of 38 percent in the latest Quinnipiac poll. Some of the campaign pledges that inspired Biden’s supporters, from voting rights to immigration reform, have fallen by the wayside. A jobs report Friday suggested the economy has been slowed down by the delta variant.”

Harry Enten: “President Joe Biden won the 2020 election in large part because he was able to win the center. He emerged with a 13-point win with independent voters, a group that Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton lost by 4 points in 2016. (House Democratic candidates, for their part, took independents by 9 points in 2020.)”

“That’s why it should be alarming to Biden that the recent downturn in his approval rating has come disproportionately from independents, as the Washington Post‘s Henry Olsen first pointed out. This slide could have major electoral implications, if it holds.”

Joe Biden became the first president to issue a proclamation of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, CNN reports.

The holiday will be marked on Monday, which it shares with Columbus Day.

“The White House on Friday formally blocked an attempt by former President Donald Trump to withhold documents from Congress related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, setting up a legal showdown between the current and former president over executive privilege,” NBC News reports.