Less than 72 hours before a debate for President Joe Biden that was widely seen as catastrophic, top members of his campaign team are lashing out at the president’s Democratic critics — facing expressions of grief, dread and fear over the debate with targeted mockery. at once. allies.
In a fundraising email sent Saturday night, Biden deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty criticized “some smug Podcasters,” a not-so-veiled reference to “Pod Save America” hosts Jon Favreau, Tommy Vietor, Dan Pfeiffer and Jon Lovett, all former advisers to President Barack Obama who seemed heartbroken in the Thursday night podcast episode.
So-called bed-wetting is back, the campaign says. And they are wrong, just like before.
There are some problems with this. One of them is that those “who wet the bed” were right panic about the possibility of losing to Donald Trump in 2016. Another is that you are asking voters to distrust what they themselves witnessed from Biden on Thursday night. And yet another is that this criticism ignores a vital point: they don’t want to have this conversation either. They would like the collapse of the debate not to happen. They as Biden, I love his policies and I think he’s been great at the job.
“We are the Democratic Party and we are the ones trying to fight for a democracy where you can disagree thoughtfully, without being obnoxious, 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’s any criticism out there, it’s bad. My opinion is that it’s okay to have this conversation now. I’d rather have it now than in October.”
“President Biden himself says that the future of American democracy is at stake and it would be irresponsible not to talk about the best way to win,” Vietor added in a text to Playbook. “This isn’t about some Beltway wimps acting soft. These are widespread concerns across the electorate.”
Favreau told POLITICO this is not about Biden’s ability to to be President. He believes he can do the job. He’s worried 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 that, no matter how good the campaign team is, he said.
Then there’s James Carville, the famous Democratic strategist who managed President Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign.
He admitted he doesn’t know if Biden will be the nominee in November. But nothing he’s seen since the debate has changed his mind: “I think he should not be”, Carville told us, hours after his name was used in a fundraising text for the Biden campaign. “Damn, in politics sometimes you have to give the people what they want.”
Carville said it’s possible he could lose money and even friends by being so direct. He told POLITICO that he’s gotten calls in recent days from prominent Democrats telling him he needs to stop this because it’s not being helpful right now. But the most important caveat: “No one says, ‘You’re wrong.’”
There are already signs that attempts to bypass Biden are incomplete at best, with doubts lingering in some of Washington’s most powerful quarters.
Even as Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries appeared on Sunday morning talk shows to rally support for the president, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) went beyond most Democrats elected during his own appearance on MSNBC’s “Velshi.”
“There was a big problem with Joe Biden’s debate performance,” Raskin said. “There are very honest, serious and rigorous conversations taking place at all levels of our party. …We are having a serious conversation about what to do. One thing I can say is that regardless of what President Biden decides, our party will be unified…Whether he is the nominee or someone else is the nominee, he will be the keynote speaker at our convention. He will be the figure around whom we will rally to move forward and defeat the forces of authoritarianism and reaction in the country.”
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