President Biden spoke in the Rose Garden yesterday. I still haven’t watched his speech and I’m not going to. I saw someone say that he sounded fine and why did the party even make him drop out of the race. As I said previously, that will be one of the biggest political mysteries/what-ifs in modern American political history. What would have happened if Democrats had Biden’s back and they held strong with him, in the same way Republicans held strong and dumb for Trump for the past nine years? What if Democrats had a white man on top of the ticket, the same white man who is the only person to ever beat Trump? Well, there’s been a blizzard of postmortems from Democrats since Election Day, most of which are just idiotic, too idiotic to even amplify. But I did find this analysis interesting, from a former Biden staffer:
Barack Obama has been blamed for the Democrats’ election loss after “pushing” Joe Biden out of the white house. The outgoing president believes he was forced to step down from the race to challenge Donald Trump by Mr Obama, sources say.
“There is no singular reason why we lost, but a big reason is because the Obama advisers publicly encouraged Democratic infighting to push Joe Biden out, didn’t even want Kamala Harris as the nominee, and then signed up as the saviours of the campaign only to run outdated Obama-era playbooks for a candidate that wasn’t Obama,” a former Biden staffer told the Politico news website.
There is a sense that Mr Obama, who once brokered a deal to install Hillary Clinton as the Democratic candidate to face Mr Trump in 2016, has contributed to their party’s last two defeats, Mr Biden’s aides also told CNN. Mr Obama started quietly manoeuvring to pressure Mr Biden to drop his bid for a second term in office earlier this year amid questions over the president’s mental fitness. Sources said Mr Biden’s aides feel this was the wrong decision, just as when Mr Obama pushed for Mrs Clinton to be given the Democratic nomination.
Inside the Biden camp, there is now a feeling the president would have had a better chance of winning over white, working class voters, who ultimately opted for Mr Trump over Ms Harris.
I covered this as it unfolded over the summer – Obama and Obama’s former staffers were a huge part of the intraparty coup and the move to push Biden out of the race. Once Biden did drop out, Obama refused to endorse Kamala Harris for days until Democrats publicly called him out for his lack of support for both Biden and Harris. In those awful weeks in July, Obama could have calmed a lot of nerves across the board as a party elder, but instead he let it be known that he thought Biden should drop out and that Democrats needed a mini-primary, rather than supporting Kamala Harris. In the midst of all of that, Obama centered himself and told everyone that he saw himself as the uniter of the party, just as VP Harris was literally uniting the party behind her.
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