Yahoo News ‘F*cking Disaster’: Former Obama Aides Stick the Knife Into Biden
The Biden campaign is attracting a bunch of unwanted Obama-era nostalgia—this time in the form of President Barack Obama’s former aides loudly trashing President Joe Biden and his re-election prospects.
The Biden campaign has long leaned into Obama’s popularity to bolster support from the party base but the love does not appear to be mutual, particularly after Biden’s stumbling debate performance.
In an extraordinarily frank post on X on Wednesday, Jon Lovett, former Obama speechwriter and a podcast co-host, wrote that Biden should leave the race now with his dignity and his legacy intact. “Or he can leave a stubborn old man who allowed hubris and insecurity to destroy his legacy and perhaps our democracy with it.”
“There have always been two Joe Bidens,” he continued. “The empathetic, decent, big-hearted leader, forged in loss and grief, finding the good in his friends and opponents, in love with America, arms wide and open with space for everyone. And there’s the blowhard with a chip on his shoulder, stubborn, something to prove, his fellow senators rolling their eyes as the finger wags harder and the stories get longer. Statesman and politician, hero and fool.”
Obama himself was one of the first Democratic leaders to defend Biden’s abysmal debate performance but he reportedly didn’t warn Biden that Hollywood heavyweight George Clooney had given him a heads up that he was going to ask Biden to withdraw in an op-ed Clooney published Wednesday.
Clooney reportedly made the decision after co-hosting a campaign fundraiser in Los Angeles three weeks ago, where he noticed Biden’s decline. Obama was in attendance, as were former “Obama bros” Jon Favreau and Tommy Vietor, who now host the podcast “Pod Save America.”
“We all walked out of that fundraiser here in L.A. and we’re talking to each other … and we’re like, that was chilling. It was very, very, very unnerving,” Vietor said.
(L-R) Jon Favreau, Stacey Abrams, Jon Lovett, Tommy Vietor and Daniel Pfeiffer speak at a Pod Save America event in June.
In the podcast’s first post-debate show, Favreau told the audience that he didn’t want to sugar coat Biden’s poor debate performance.
“I think it was a fucking disaster,” Favreau said. “I think it was maybe the worst debate I’ve ever seen in my entire life.”
“Is the riskiest path staying with Joe Biden?” co-host Lovett chimed in to ask. “Or is the riskiest path saying, ‘We want someone else’?, “And anybody who says that that is not a tough call right now is full of fucking shit.”
Former Obama senior adviser David Axelrod piled onto Democratic criticism of the president, predicting over the weekend that Biden was likely to lose to Trump “by a landslide,” adding to his comments on X that the president is “dangerously out-of-touch” with voters.
The escalating pressure from the Obama old guard is in line with many of their previous public comments criticizing the Biden campaign. Favreau was publicly sharing concerns about Biden’s electability back in January and has said Biden’s refusal to change his Israel policy made him “look weak.”
The Biden campaign is adamant that the president will stay in the race, and deputy Biden campaign manager Rob Flaherty seemed to mock the podcasters’ concerns in a fundraising email after the debate, making thinly veiled references to “some self-important Podcasters” wetting the bed.
Vietor responded on X that telling dissenters “to stop bed wetting” or “shut up” contradicts democracy, especially for a president who’s platform frequently insists that if Trump is re-elected, “the future of American democracy is at stake.”
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