Joe Biden’s former allies are running for the hills.
Questions about the former president’s mental faculties took on a new urgency last month thanks to the artificial drip-drip of revelations leaked to outlets ahead of the release of Original Sin, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s book about the ill-fated Biden re-election bid.
Now, the Trump administration and GOP Congress are pushing the narrative along with investigations into the use of an “autopen” by the former president when signing official documents — a move Donald Trump has baselessly alleged could mean that some shadowy figure was really running the show for four years.
The Democratic Party is in the wilderness, electorally speaking, and undergoing a real internal reckoning over the mismanaged 2024 re-election campaign of Joe Biden and the final stretch sprint that was Kamala Harris’s own bid for the top job.
No one is more lost in this reshuffle than the members of Bidenworld, who found themselves jobless and loathed by a certain segment of the party after last year. Facing the clear prospect of being blacklisted by future Democratic campaigns and causes, some are rebranding themselves.
Others are cutting ties altogether.
Wednesday arrived in Washington with the news that Karine Jean-Pierre, Biden’s White House press secretary for four years, was in the latter group. Hawking a new book titled Independent (no relation!), Jean-Pierre announced through representatives that she is leaving the party. The book’s description labels the Biden White House “broken” and was met with skepticism from journalists, who questioned how “outside the party lines” the president’s former press secretary could organically be.
The news also enraged Democrats with ties to the former administration, according to Politico, who called it a “grift” and mostly held to fuming in group chats.
Others in this category have dropped off the face of the (political) Earth: Jen O’Malley Dillon, Harris’s former campaign chair, hasn’t made a public comment since appearing on a Pod Save America interview in the immediate aftermath of the election. Same with ex-campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez. Several other top and mid-level Harris and Biden campaign officials have either sunk into relative obscurity or, such as was the case with former Biden White House spokesman Andrew Bates, struck out on their own.
That’s to say nothing, of course, of Harris herself.
The former vice president continues to be virtually invisible as she reportedly weighs a run for governor of her home state (where she hasn’t lived for four years), against what would likely be a field crowded with other Democrats. Doing so would expose her to tough questions about her former running mate.
She has yet to pull the trigger, with that likely being a major reason why.
There’s one clear reason for this: Joe Biden’s continued inability to refute any of the concerns about his age and ability to make a case for himself. It seemed like the former president’s fade into obscurity began the day he ceded the presidential position on the re-election ticket to Harris; his most prominent moment in the weeks following was his pardon of Hunter, his son, in December.
In a half-hearted effort to head off the worst of the Original Sin blowback, the former president appeared — alongside the former first lady — on The View, a comparatively friendly interview, before the book’s release. It did not go well. A whispery ex-president’s sentences were finished for him, and there was little sign of the fiery scrapper from Scranton whose antics were once the subject of memes and TV references, not derision.
Neither the GOP nor a scandal-hungry Capitol press corps is eager to let this story die. Joe Biden seems wholly unable to kill it. The only question now is how long the stink of the last year remains on those affected, and how widespread it really is. Could it blunt Harris’s ambitions? Probably. Less clear: its effect on Cabinet officials, like Pete Buttigieg. Or Rahm Emanuel, Biden’s former ambassador to Japan, who’s now publicly indicating that he may run in 2028.
In the end, the former president’s re-election bid could end up irreversibly tarring a whole segment of Democratic operatives and even a few of the party’s (formerly) rising stars.
