By Dave Andrusko
I’m with Ed Morrissey. This kind of admission of behind the scenes chicanery doesn’t usually (maybe ever) come out until after an election. “Instead, longtime Obama-Biden political adviser Anita Dunn has decided to go public with the answers to the biggest political mystery in America since John Kerry chose ambulance-chaser John Edwards as a running mate,” Morrissey writes. “According to Dunn in her interview with Politico, Nancy Pelosi stabbed Biden in the back just when it appeared he’d ridden out the debate damage.”
Nobody old enough to ride a bike ever thought pro-abortion president Joe Biden voluntarily agreed not to run again. He was shoved out as Dunn makes abundantly clear.
The interview with Politico goes on and on and on; it’s 5,488 words long. The key is, according to Dunn, Biden’s debate performance, widely seen as the turning point, was not nearly as devastating as widely believed.
Dunn, who was monitoring a group of undecided voters, admits Biden started out slow.
“Voters didn’t particularly like Biden’s performance in the first half hour. He wasn’t scoring well at all. But it’s not as though they walked out,” she said. “They very much liked a lot of the second half of the debate for Joe Biden. They hated Donald Trump.”
Biden fancies himself the comeback kid. “Indeed, Dunn and the Biden team thought they had seen this movie before,” Ryan Lizza writes. “They developed a strategy to power through the media and party mob dumping on Biden, and race to the virtual convention vote, after which they bet that everyone would move on.”
But….
But this time it was different. Unlike Biden’s core team, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Barack Obama and Hakeem Jeffries were never convinced on the legend of Biden.
Dunn defended the decision to have the debate take place June 27, the earliest debate ever. Basically, she told Lizza that pro-life former President Donald Trump was getting a free ride from the media while Biden was getting hammered:
But we were seeing an environment in the press that was just unremittingly negative. And nobody was covering Trump whatsoever. I mean, Donald Trump was out there doing and saying whatever he wanted to do and the press was like, “We don’t care.”
Just about everyone else, besides Dunn, believes Biden bombed. She attributed his performance to a terrible cold but didn’t consider withdrawing based on years of seeing Biden plow through. In addition
“So Trump didn’t gain any ground in the debate whatsoever,“ Dunn said. “And we actually picked up a few votes in the group [of undecided voters]. So it was a bad debate, but it didn’t feel catastrophic at all, certainly in terms of voters. And I think other people who did independent research saw roughly the same thing. If you go back and you look at the polls, what you will see is you didn’t see much movement whatsoever coming out of the debate because the structure of this campaign had been fairly static for a long time, and the debate didn’t change that.
What did change it was 24 days of unremitting negative, horrible attacks on Joe Biden.
Lizza asks “From his own party?”
From his own party and from the press.
Then Dunn talks about “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.
After observing that Biden never really explained why he withdrew, Lizza then turns to the coup, a word Dunn flatly rejects. “Well, I know the reasons that Schumer and Pelosi were saying to him. …. It doesn’t seem like he ever agreed with those arguments,” Lizza says.
Well, I would say he was campaigning. He was campaigning in front of large and enthusiastic crowds. So the idea that somehow he couldn’t campaign was just ludicrous.
Whether you agree with Dunn’s analysis or not, her comments pull the curtain back on why a notoriously stubborn man withdrew.
Morrissey concludes
But clearly she sees Pelosi as the author of Biden’s demise as a candidate, and just as clearly she isn’t in the mood to forgive either. How that plays with Kamala Harris’ campaign while Dunn plays a leading role remains to be seen.