The Washington Post is reporting today that Democrats are less than thrilled that they are still debating Joe Biden’s decision to run for office this many months after the last election.
As Democrats struggle to coalesce around a winning message for next year’s midterms, the party remains haunted by the ghost of Joe Biden’s failed reelection bid.
Rep. Ro Khanna of California has said he “made a mistake” in backing Biden’s candidacy. Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut said there was “no doubt” Biden suffered cognitive decline while in office. And on Sunday, former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg was asked about Biden — and said firmly he “should not have run.”
Why are we still talking about this 10 months after the last election? You can thank Kamala Harris for that. She’s got a book coming out and is doing a book tour to support it. So far the only big news from the book is her change of heart about Biden running again. So the questions about that topic will remain front and center at least until her book tour ends in November.
“’It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized,” Harris writes in an excerpt from her forthcoming book published last week in The Atlantic. “Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness.”
The persistent hand-wringing over Biden — nearly eight months after he left the White House — is particularly aggravating to Democrats eager to move on and focus on health care costs, Republican tax breaks for the wealthy and rising economic pressures.
But some in the party — especially those pondering a 2028 run for the White House — find themselves repeatedly facing questions about whether Biden should have run for reelection and why they did not do more to stop him. Many Democrats are also dreading Harris’s upcoming book tour, which seems certain to center on questions about Biden.
“The overwhelming majority of elected Democrats are focused on moving forward. There’s no interest for them in re-litigating this and neither are the vast majority of voters,” said Tommy Vietor, a former Obama administration official who co-hosts the podcast “Pod Save America.” “But that kind of candor is going to be a prerequisite to be seen as credible. I think it will be important for the 2028 primary; people will be asked, ‘What did you know when?’”
Of course the people angriest about all this are the Biden die-hards. They are clearly furious.
Joe Biden’s former aides have attacked Kamala Harris saying she “knows nothing” and was “out of her depth” after she laid into the former president…
…his aides have hit back, telling Axios: “Vice-president Harris was simply not good at the job.
“She had basically zero substantive role in any of the administration’s key work streams, and instead would just dive bomb in for stilted photo ops that exposed how out of depth she was”.
Mr Biden is “not the reason she struggled in office or tanked her 2019 campaign, or lost the 2024 campaign, for that matter. The independent variable there is the vice-president, not Biden or his aides,” another anonymous aide added.
It’s such a pretty picture. Harris blasts Biden for being reckless and for her own “colossal mistake” of going along with him. Then his people bash her as useless and bad at her job. The truth is they’re both right and now it can be told.
Still, it’s ridiculous that Democrats are pretending that everyone is going to be asked tough questions about what they knew and when they knew it before the circus can move on. If we learned anything from 2024 it’s that Democrats are willing to lie about what they’ve seen, what they know and when they knew it. What good does it do to prompt them to lie some more about not knowing anything about Biden’s mental decline.
Harris’ book tour has nothing to do with telling the truth, we know that already. It’s about pivoting to a defensible position now so that she can run again for office in 2028. By then she figures no one will remember or care what she said about Biden at the time or how much money she blew in the last election. She’ll be able to claim it’s all old news and she’s talked about it in her book. That’s all this is about, setting up the next set of talking points on Joe Biden’s mental fitness.
My own take is that she’s not likely to get very far in the next presidential primary. She’s not a good speaker, not a good manager and doesn’t have a good record as a VP or as a candidate. In short, the Biden people are right about her. Put her on a stage with Gavin Newsom and he’s going to run circles around her.
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