Joe Biden’s presidency is no more. It was four years of failure and chaos. It was also an exercise in inflated egos—Biden thinks he’s one of the most accomplished presidents in history but can’t list anything when asked in interviews. When your go-to talking point for policies that helped America’s middle class is a bill that made it easier to break up monopolies, you’ve done nothing. No one cares that when credit card debt has exploded to historic highs and inflation continues to pummel working families.
As the dust settles from the melee that forced the president to exit the race, one senior aide knows who’s to blame, and it’s not Barack Obama. Though the former president did play a part in drumming up the pressure on his former vice president (via NY Post):
A top adviser to President Biden is “absolutely” blaming House Speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi for tanking his re-election campaign — and accusing Democratic donors of ignoring the will of their party’s primary voters in swapping him out for Vice President Kamala Harris.
Anita Dunn, a White House senior adviser on communications who has since departed for a Harris super PAC, inveighed against Biden’s doubters in Congress and elsewhere in her first interview since the 81-year-old president dropped out of the 2024 race.
“You know, clearly there were leaders of the party who decided to go ahead and go very public. And that gave permission to other people to go public,” Dunn told Politico of the growing chorus of Democrats calling on Biden to abandon his run after his debate flop June 27.
Asked whether she was referring to “senators and House members” as well as “when Nancy Pelosi goes on TV twice when things feel like they’re dying down and reopens the debate,” Dunn shot back, “Absolutely.”
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Biden’s huffy and slurred farewell address was a mini-State of the Union where the lame-duck president listed things he planned to accomplish. None of them will get done this deep in an election cycle and a House Republican majority. The president made the case for a second term—the country didn’t want it. It’s why he quit; he was veering quickly toward a 1980-style defeat. His June 27 debate with Donald Trump was a disaster, an election-killing event that led to the Democratic Party rebellion that became too widespread to quell.
The president is said to have especially sour feelings toward Obama, who he felt was the true puppet master; maybe he was. Obama certainly was aware of the damning op-ed penned by George Clooney, which increased the pressure on Biden to quit. The former president didn’t order the hit piece but didn’t do anything to dissuade the Hollywood star from sending it to The New York Times.
If Biden had hit grand slams in the three interviews post-debate on ABC, NBC, and BET, he might still be the 2024 Democratic candidate. Instead, they were middling trainwrecks, with the BET interview being especially brutal, forgetting the name of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who Biden referred to as the “black man.” Then, his Nevada trip, where he caught COVID and possibly had a mini-stroke or transient ischemic attack, put the final nail in the coffin. The president had also met with his top money man, Jeffrey Katzenberg, who said the fundraising operation was bleeding to death.
Pelosi has maintained she wasn’t behind the effort to force out Biden, saying she never called anyone. Every reporter who has covered the former House speaker knows that’s a lie. Frankly, I think Pelosi, Obama, and Schumer formed a triumvirate in this effort to dump Joe. You know this already. It only exposes how weak this presidency was since this office is supposed to squash uprisings like this, given the built-in institutional power and advantages. It goes back to Pelosi’s trashing of Biden’s political operation. When she saw they could easily be outflanked—she pounced:
“I’ve never been that impressed with his political operation,” she told The New Yorker in an interview published Thursday. “They won the White House. Bravo. But my concern was: this ain’t happening, and we have to make a decision for this to happen. The President has to make the decision for that to happen.”
[…]
While Pelosi privately voiced concerns to Biden about the dire polling of June and July which suggested a widening battleground map, she has only just begun to publicly reflect on her view that the Biden campaign was not in a winning position. The San Francisco Democrat was still hesitant to admit playing a singular role in the push to bring Biden down.
“I really wanted him to make a decision for a better campaign, because they were not facing the fact of what was happening,” Pelosi said after praising Biden’s accomplishments. “We couldn’t see it go down the drain, because Trump was going to be president and then he was going to take the House. Imagine! Imagine how that would be! Well, we don’t have to imagine. We saw.”
She’s ruthless, always has been, despite her moments where she blows up at the media.
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