President Joe Biden’s historic letter announcing the end of his campaign omitted a crucial element: an endorsement, as veteran Rep. James C. Clyburn advised him to do, he revealed in recounting the momentous private conversation.
Clyburn is a longtime loyalist who helped bring Biden to South Carolina in 2020 to catapult him to the White House. This year, when the president was in the spotlight following his debate disaster, “we stuck with Joe Biden,” Clyburn said at an Axios event outside the Democratic convention.
“When Joe Biden decided to leave the stage, he called me over and read me his statement around 1 o’clock. I’ll never forget it because it was my 45th anniversary of my 39th birthday,” she joked.
The statement finally told the country that Biden had seen what many party leaders had pushed for: that he would resign in the “best interest” of his party and his country.
“I got that call, she read me her statement. I told her there was something missing… I told her I couldn’t leave the stage without endorsing somebody. She said she would make a second statement in an hour. And that second statement came out at 1:46. At 1:47 I was on the phone. And I grabbed my little kitchen cabinet. I said we all support Kamala,” Clyburn said.
Rep. James C. Clyburn discussed the phone call he had with President Joe Biden when he told him he was ending his presidential campaign.
Clyburn’s comments did not indicate whether Biden had already made up his mind about the second statement when they spoke.
He posted on X at 2:13 on July 21 that Harris had his “full support and endorsement.”
In a former In his description of the call, Clyburn said Biden “briefed me at the time” about the second statement, without going into his own role in pointing out the “missing part.”
Clyburn, 84, is an influential member of the Congressional Black Caucus who has tirelessly supported Biden. But his July 3 statement about a “mini-primary” should Biden drop out helped jumpstart talks among Democrats about how to move forward after a withdrawal.
Clyburn said he had seen Harris “come on” after her major speeches over the past year.
The letter Biden eventually released mentioned his vice president but did not include an explicit endorsement. “I want to thank Vice President Kamala Harris for being an extraordinary partner in all of this work. And let me express my sincere gratitude to the American people for the faith and trust they have placed in me,” he wrote.
But his endorsement soon afterward helped set in motion an extraordinary mobilization of the party’s top leaders, which soon ended the possibility of a chaotic struggle to succeed him.
Clyburn has known Harris for years but said he gained a new appreciation for her experience after the Tennessee House of Representatives voted to expel Black lawmakers last year.
“The night she got on that plane and flew to Tennessee, when those two young African-American brothers… were denied or expelled from the legislature, the speech she gave that night. I was sitting there and right in the middle of that speech, I said, ‘she’s arrived,'” Clyburn said.
“I saw it, I felt it, and then she responded to Dobbs. I told her I was cooking, you know? So it was easy for me.”
