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In today’s edition:

• Four Biden presidencies in one, plus the two sides of Harris
• Long live the overpaid cable news host?
• How control of the Senate could come down to Maryland

The Biden quartet

Within the Biden presidency, there are, really, four presidencies jockeying for primacy. One can only assume that whichever is at the fore at any given time is governed by imbalances of the administration’s humors — an excess of black bile resulting in more centrism and so on and so forth.

Or maybe it has to do with politics. Okay, Perry Bacon says it definitely has to do with politics; sorry, Hippocrates.

As Perry explains, those four presidencies are:

• The progressive, spendy “Elizabeth Warren version”
• The culturally centrist one worried about repelling workers
• The anti-Trump “resistance” focused on democracy (and abortion rights)
• The internationalist presidency focused on maintaining the country’s status as world leader

These four presidencies very much can all fit under one White House roof, Perry writes, providing a few examples of administration actions that prove this. But he notes that there are two “presidencies” that Biden is really leaning into for his reelection and one he’s playing down.

Kathleen Parker would surely take any of the four Biden presidencies over one led by Kamala Harris, whom she writes has fallen down on the job of veep — and might even drag Biden’s reelection down with her.

“This is why I propose with all due respect,” Kathleen writes, “that Harris step away from the ticket.” A lot of people, she writes, would inspire more confidence in the role that’s just a heartbeat away from president.

But Gene Robinson offers a counterpoint: He writes that Harris’s dogged defense of abortion rights has been a real winner that ought to make Republicans quake in their boots. The fact that Harris this week became the first sitting president or vice president ever to visit an abortion clinic tells you everything you need to know about the politics of the issue.

Republicans trying to ignore the subject might benefit from the reminder that — to borrow some infamous word salad from the vice president — they do in fact exist in the context of all in which they live and what came before them.

Chaser: Democrats have a whole bunch of campaign advantages they might not be fully appreciating, Jen Rubin advises in her latest newsletter. Sign up to get it in your inbox here.

From Erik Wemple’s column wrestling with his feelings on cable news hosts’ sky-high pay packages. He reports that Anderson Cooper and Sean Hannity bring in eight figures, and he cites the equally outrageous earnings of former hosts Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon.

Ultimately, however, he begrudges them their massive payouts: “This is an industry that has earned its money, one redundant bout of stale analysis after another.” With the number of U.S. households paying for cable news in decline, Erik hopes for the sake of journalism that it stays that way.

In other words, he’ll take the “grotesque pay scale” of the status quo if that means keeping cable networks from becoming even more desperate and craven in their attempts to get viewers to tune in.

Less politics

Could control of the Senate really come down to … Maryland? The state is not, as Selina Meyer would have you believe, in the glory that is the Deep South, nor has it elected a Republican to the Senate since 1980.

But Karen Tumulty writes that voters in the state might be tempted to send their stratospherically popular former Republican governor Larry Hogan to the Capitol this fall, and in a cycle whose Senate map is already brutal for Democrats, doing so could swing control of the chamber.

Hogan explained to Karen in an interview that he would be a unique voice in the Senate, an unabashedly moderate Republican standing athwart that species’ extinction. Sure, Karen says, but she cautions Marylanders to weigh whether “having that one voice is more important than the danger of turning over the entire chamber to the most extreme forces on the right.”

Smartest, fastest

• David Ignatius reports that Biden’s rift with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu goes much deeper than an offensive in Rafah. And Jason Willick argues that the spat between the two leaders shows the limits of democracy as a foreign-policy tool.
• Fareed Zakaria writes that Vladimir Putin is clearly in it to win it in Ukraine. But is the West?
• Without international intervention, Lee Hockstader cautions, Haiti’s already blood-soaked dystopia could degrade further — into all-out civil war.

It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … The Bye-Ku.

Yeah, can I get, uh

A president combo pack?

But sub out the side?

Plus! A Friday bye-ku (Fri-ku!) from reader Danièle G.:

Immigration views

Collide with real-life faces

Reality wins

***

Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. Have a great weekend!