House Speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi is “absolutely” to blame for President Joe Biden pulling the plug on his re-election bid, according to one of his top advisers.
Longtime Biden adviser Anita Dunn is blaming the press and “leaders of the party” for the way Biden’s campaign played out and that some, like Pelosi, chose to “go very public” with negative reactions to his infamous debate against former President Donald Trump.
“So it was a bad debate, but it didn’t feel catastrophic at all, certainly in terms of voters,” Dunn, who has moved on to Future Forward PAC to help elect Kamala Harris as president, said on the Playbook Deep Dive podcast.
“What did change it was 24 days of unremitting negative, horrible attacks on Joe Biden,” she said. “From his own party and from the press.”
In the days that followed the June debate, Dunn said the “snowball effect” of negative press was unrelenting though the data did not show changes in polls.
“We were looking at it and we were not seeing huge changes. But we were seeing an environment in the press that was just unremittingly negative,” she recounted. “So you had a lot of different things going on here. 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.”
“Are you talking about senators and House members? Or do you mean like when Nancy Pelosi goes on TV twice when things feel like they’re dying down and reopens the debate?” Politico’s Ryan Lizza asked the former Biden adviser.
“Absolutely,” she replied.
“Key moments where people made the decision when it looked like we were reaching a point where we would fight our way through it,” Dunn continued. “And then you had this decision that the Democratic Party made to ignore their primary voters and ignore their primary process, and that was a very donor-driven thing.”
Dunn dismissed the notion that Biden stepping off the Democratic ticket was a “coup” as she praised Vice President Kamala Harris for being “nothing except unremittingly loyal and supportive to the president throughout this.”
“You know, we’re a party that likes to talk about voting and voting rights — and some leaders made a decision that they wanted to go disenfranchise everyone who participated in the primaries. People went and they voted for Joe Biden,” Dunn contended, explaining how they fought to keep Biden as the nominee but there was a ” fantasy idea that there was going to be town halls across the country” which she believed could turn “extraordinarily ugly.”
In a letter to Congress, Biden insisted he had no intention of stepping aside. But the pressure campaign against him grew stronger. Hollywood star George Clooney, who had hosted a fundraiser for the president, soon penned an op-ed in the New York Times calling on him to step aside. At that same time, Pelosi warned on MSNBC that “time is running short” to find a replacement nominee and, weeks later, she was gushing about how Biden should be part of Mt. Rushmore.
Pelosi seemed to throw some shade at Biden’s campaign team in an interview published this week.
“So I really wanted him to make a decision of a better campaign because they were not facing the fact of what was happening,” she told the New Yorker.
“Just a little background, I’ve never been that impressed with his political operation,” she added. “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.”
Pelosi rubs salt in Biden’s raw wound: ‘I’ve never been that impressed’ https://t.co/z0HQ4kSRRS via @BIZPACReview
— BPR based (@DumpstrFireNews) August 9, 2024
“I never called one person, but people were calling me saying that there was a challenge there. So there had to be a change in the leadership of the campaign, or what would come next,” she told David Remnick.
Writers and editors can be contacted at [email protected] with feedback, tips, or corrections.
Originally from New York, Powers graduated from New York University and eventually made her way to sunny South Florida. Powers also contributes to BizPac Review.
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