Former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms has joined the White House to serve as senior advisor to the president for public engagement.
Bottoms will be replacing Cedric Richmond as one of his most senior aides.
The announcement was made on Wednesday by President Joe Biden who said that Bottoms “will oversee the White House Office of Public Engagement, which works at the local, state, and national levels to ensure community leaders, diverse perspectives, and new voices have the opportunity to inform the work of the President in an inclusive, transparent and responsible way.”
Bottoms is currently a CNN political commentator and vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee. She served as mayor of Atlanta from 2018 to 2022.
Bottoms welcomed the news by issuing a statement via her Instagram.
“Mayor Bottoms understands that democracy is about making government work for working families, for the people who are the backbone of this country. She led the city of Atlanta with strength through the pandemic, through a summer of protests and pain, and through the mass shooting that left Atlanta’s Asian American community in fear,” Biden said in a statement.
“Keisha is bright, honorable, tough and has the integrity required to represent our Administration to the American public. Jill and I have known Keisha for a long time and look forward to working with her more closely.”
In 2020, Bottoms claimed that President-elect Joe Biden offered her a position in his Cabinet, but she did not accept it.
“Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms was honored to have been offered a role in the Cabinet, which she respectfully declined,” Rashad Taylor, Bottoms’ senior adviser, said at the time in a statement to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Biden’s approval ratings ahead of the midterm elections were just 39.7%, worse than Donald Trump’s ratings at this point in 2018.
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