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Good Friday morning. I'm Adrienne Hurst and welcome to your Playbook Daily briefing.

There's one word, or maybe a lack of one word, that's driving the chatter on the hill today.

Crisis. Crisis. And still refusing to call it a crisis as thousands of unaccompanied children are held in crowded shelters.

We're talking, of course, about what Biden's team calls the situation or the challenge at the southern border

where thousands of migrants are streaming during a still raging pandemic.

The administration's bracing for the biggest migration wave in more than two decades.

Republicans are saying that sounds like a crisis to us. But Biden's crew

is keeping the C word out of their mouths. This week, DHS Secretary Mayorkas called it a difficult

situation. Yesterday, though, press secretary Jen Saki slipped up at a press conference before

she was called on it by a reporter and corrected herself.

Unrelated to any vaccine doses or request for them that they would be partners in dealing with the crisis on the border.

You said crisis on the border.

Was that a challenges on the border?

Okay.

But so that's not, that doesn't reflect any change in the administration.

This morning, playbook co-author Ryan Liza breaks down why the laser focus on semantics by both parties matters right now.

The reason for this linguistic dance is that the border crisis, sorry, interferes with what has until now been an enormously effective strategy for Biden, staying laser-focused

on the two crises he was elected to solve. It's not that Biden isn't doing anything about the

surge. It's just not part of the White House messaging on a week when he wanted to talk about

shots in arms and checks in pockets, causes that are far more popular than anything he could do

on immigration right now. Further evidence, while Democrats in the House spent Thursday passing

...