Biden ’privately railing’ about architects of ’historic’ losses for Dems urging him to quit
Despite recovering from his bout with Covid-19, President Joe Biden is reportedly firing back at top Democratic strategists pushing him to drop out of the 2024 race.
The New York Times reported that the 81 year-old Biden is still throwing barbs at his detractors despite 'coughing and hacking' while under isolation at his home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. The 46th president is once again having to contend with a new wave of Democrats in both the House and Senate calling on him to step aside in order to give Democrats the best chance to defeat former President Donald Trump in November.
In the report by the Times' Peter Baker, Michael D. Shear and Katie Rogers, senior Biden aides speaking on the condition of anonymity said the president had fiery words for Democratic strategists trying to convince him to abandon his reelection campaign. Even former President Barack Obama — who said this week that Biden should reconsider his viability as a candidate — was reportedly the target of Biden's ire.
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"In privately railing about Mr. Obama and even aides to former President Bill Clinton, Mr. Biden has made clear that he finds it particularly rich that the architects of historic Democratic losses in the 1994 and 2010 midterm elections would be lecturing him about how to save the party after he presided over a better-than-expected midterm in 2022," wrote Baker, Shear and Rogers.
Biden didn't mention him by name according to the Times, but it's likely his comment about the Clinton adviser behind the staggering 1994 midterm loss for Democrats is James Carville. In an op-ed for the Times earlier this month, Carville wrote that Biden wouldn't be able to defeat Trump and that the Democratic Party should pick a different nominee this summer.
"It’s been an agonizing time for those of us who think President Biden more than earned a second term but isn’t going to win one. But now we’ve got to move on," he wrote.
As one of Clinton's top strategists 30 years ago, Carville was chiefly responsible for Democrats' strategy for the 1994 midterms in which Democrats lost 34 House seats and Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia) became speaker. His catchphrase ("it's the economy, stupid") rang hollow as Republicans routed Democrats and further frustrated Clinton's first-term agenda. And in 2022, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, which is the chief organization behind Project 2025, quoted Carville's catchphrase to justify his ultimately incorrect prediction of a "red wave" in the most recent midterm that never actually materialized.
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Biden has reiterated that he has no plans to leave the race despite more than 30 House Democrats and Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico), Jon Tester (D-Montana) and Peter Welch (D-Vermont) all pressing him to end his reelection bid. However, Biden also has some high-level support: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) have both stated that they believe Biden is capable of beating Trump this fall.
In a video she posted to Instagram Live early Friday morning, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) told her followers about the details of a call she had with top Democratic members of Congress, attorneys and strategists about the pressure campaign to cajole Biden into stepping aside. She said that while the base seems to be coalescing around Vice President Kamala Harris as the heir apparent to Biden's campaign, Democratic megadonors were angling for an open convention in which a lesser-known candidate could emerge as the nominee.
"A huge amount of the donor class and a huge amount of these elites, and a huge amount of these folks in these rooms that I see that are pushing for President Biden not to be the nominee, also are not interested in seeing the vice president being the nominee," Ocasio-Cortez said. "Will they win out on that? I don't know. But I am here to tell you: do not take that for granted."
Click here to read the Times' report in full (subscription required).
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