Anita Dunn, longtime adviser to President Joe Biden, unloaded on Democrat leaders such as Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer for pushing Biden out of the presidential race after the debate without any reasoning.
She also doesn’t deny that Biden is still angry at the Democratic Congressional leaders.
Dunn tries to gloss over the debate, latching onto the “he had a cold” narrative while bragging he did a great job afterward at Waffle House and a huge rally the next day. That doesn’t make any sense, but okay.
Dunn builds up to her criticisms by pointing out Biden didn’t lose much ground after the debate. Hot Air’s Ed Morissey already wrote about it, posting an image from RCP poll average.
Biden held an event in Wisconsin where people said they didn’t like the bullying from the press and others.
“You know, clearly there were leaders of the party who decided to go ahead and go very public,” says Dunn. “And that gave permission to other people to go public.”
Boom.
Ryan Lizza, the podcast host, pounces on the comment (last emphasis mine):
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?Absolutely.Key moments.Key moments where people made the decision when it looked like we were reaching a point where we would fight our way through it. I had a lot of Republican friends who were sending me texts during this period saying, “Your party is insane.” They were saying, “We’ve never seen anything like this. Our party closes ranks. You know, you fight it through. You have a 24-hour news cycle. He had a bad debate, and you move on.”They could not believe what was going on here. 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.
Interesting because the campaign used the primary in its argument against the haters. Biden won over 14 million voters during the process. His challenger, Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN), spent a lot of money and time in New Hampshire, where Biden didn’t make the ballot. He spent most of the time on Biden’s age.
Yet Biden won the state with a write-in campaign.
Dunn adds:
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. So we felt that we were in a fairly strong position.
Ouch.
Dunn stops short of calling it a coup because now-presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris remained loyal to Biden:
I don’t regard it as a coup, for a couple of reasons. One is because the vice president was nothing except unremittingly loyal and supportive to the president throughout this, and was fully engaged in the “What is your plan? What is our plan? What are we doing next?”So if you’re going to have a coup, usually someone has to lead it. And she was 100 percent terrifically loyal. I give her remarkable props. Her staff, she made sure there was never a murmur from anyone in that camp, and that takes an enormous amount of discipline and also an enormous amount of loyalty.
Dunn doesn’t explain why Biden pulled out, telling Lizza to wait until a book came out in 2026.
Lizza mentions that people say Biden is “still very angry at Pelosi, Obama, Schumer, to a lesser extent -” before Dunn cuts him off:
But he is 1,000 percent all-in for Kamala Harris. And that is absolutely true. The task in front of us is to win this election and to not let Donald Trump become president again and to win the House of Representatives, which had certain leaders in 2022 done a slightly better job, maybe we would control today, but we don’t.So to win, to make Hakeem Jeffries a historic speaker, and he will be a great speaker. To keep Chuck Schumer, Democratic leader of the Senate, which is going to be a very, very tough job, but that is the job ahead of us. And it’s critical because, as the president has said, this country is at an inflection point. All of us who believe that and who believe Joe Biden when he said that he has one job right now and that is to make sure she wins and that we win the House and we keep the Senate.
I wonder who Lizza planned on naming. I’m guessing Dunn knew, and that’s why she jumped in.
But did you notice her not denying that Biden is still angry at those people? Weird, huh?
Dunn left the White House to head Future Forward, the super PAC devoted to electing Harris in November.
Will her grudge continue?
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