Less than 72 hours after a debate performance by President Joe Biden that was widely seen as catastrophic, top members of his campaign team are lashing out at the president’s Democratic critics, confronting expressions of pain, dread and fear over the debate with mockery directed at once. allies.
In a fundraising email sent Saturday night, Biden deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty criticized “some cocky podcasters” — a not-so-veiled reference to “Pod Save America” hosts Jon Favreau, Tommy Vietor, Dan Pfeiffer and Jon Lovett, all former aides to President Barack Obama who sounded heartbroken in his Thursday night podcast episode.
The so-called “bed-wetting children” are back at it, the campaign claims. And they are wrong, just as they were before.
There are some problems with that. One is that those who “wet the bed” were good panic about losing to Donald Trump in 2016. Another is that voters are being asked to distrust what they themselves witnessed from Biden on Thursday night. And another is that this criticism misses a vital point: they don’t want to have this conversation either. They wish the collapse of the debate had not happened. They as Biden, I love his policies and I think he’s been excellent at his job.
“We are the Democratic Party and we are the ones trying to fight for a democracy where you can thoughtfully disagree without being nasty, trust people to be adults and have a conversation,” Favreau told POLITICO in a phone call Sunday morning. “They seem to think that if there is any criticism, it’s bad. My view is that it’s OK to have this conversation now. I’d rather have it now than in October.”
“President Biden himself says the future of American democracy is at stake and it would be irresponsible not to have a conversation about how best to win,” Vietor added in a text to Playbook. “This is not a few Beltway wimps acting soft. These are widespread concerns across the electorate.”
Favreau told POLITICO it’s not about Biden’s ability to be The president believes he can do the job. He worries about Biden’s ability to change the dynamics of the race between now and November. “It’s up to the candidate” to be able to do it no matter how good the campaign staff is, he said.
Then there’s James Carville, the famed Democratic strategist who ran President Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign.
He admitted that he doesn’t know Yeah Biden will be the nominee in November. But nothing he has seen since the debate has changed his mind: “I think should not be,” Carville told us, hours after his name was used for a Biden campaign fundraising text. “Damn, in politics sometimes you have to give the people what they want.”
Carville said he may lose money and even friends by being so outspoken. He told POLITICO that he’s received calls in recent days from high-ranking Democrats telling him he should stop because he’s not being helpful right now. But the most important caveat: “No one says, ‘You’re wrong.'”
There are already signs that efforts to encircle Biden are at best incomplete, and doubts persist in some of the most powerful quarters of Washington.
Even as Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries appeared on talk shows Sunday morning to drum up support for the president, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) went further than most elected Democrats during his own campaign appearance on MSNBC’s “Velshi.”
“There was a big problem with Joe Biden’s performance in the debate,” Raskin said. “Very honest, serious and rigorous conversations are taking place at all levels of our party. …We are having a serious conversation about what to do. One thing I can tell you is that no matter what President Biden decides, our party will be unified…Whether he is the nominee or someone else, he will be the keynote speaker at our convention. He will be the figure around whom we will unite to move forward and defeat the forces of authoritarianism and reaction in the country.”
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