Senior Democrats’ successful efforts to push Joe Biden out of the presidential race were “unfortunate, nasty and public” and did the president a “disservice”, Biden’s former White House chief of staff said – even as the new nominee, Kamala Harris, continued to fundraise strongly, campaign vigorously and show signs of catching Donald Trump in polling.
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“I was disappointed that people in the party called for [Biden] to leave the race, and I thought they got out of control,” Ron Klain said.
“I thought it was unfortunate, nasty and public, and shouldn’t have been … I thought they were doing him a disservice, but I think he handled it incredibly graciously and came up with a plan that is going to work for us in 2024.”
The podcast host Kara Swisher released her conversation with Klain on Monday, a little over a week after Biden made history by saying he would relinquish power.
Now 81, Biden was long subject to doubts about his fitness for office, but calls to quit accelerated after the first presidential debate in late June, during which Biden appeared frail and confused and failed to check Trump’s lies.
Klain left the White House last year but helped Biden prepare to debate.
He said: “I thought the debate was an opportunity for the president to put some of these questions [about his age and fitness] to rest, but obviously [it] did not go well that night and that is what it is. And so we took a gamble and the gamble didn’t work.
“I thought it was a reasonable chance to take. I thought the president, as he showed in the days after the debate, was fully capable of making his case forcefully on the stump, fully capable of answering unscripted questions, as he did at his press conference [during a Nato summit in Washington]. I thought we would see that on debate night and we just didn’t, of course.”
Klain said Biden had been “very kind” and “took responsibility in our conversations and said he’d had a bad night, and told me not to feel bad about it. I think … he just was off.”
Few Democrats agreed. Amid sympathy for Trump after an assassination attempt, and with polling showing Biden in trouble in key states, calls for the president to stand aside surged, supported by party grandees including the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, who Biden served as vice-president.
Eventually, Klain said, Biden “made a decision that he couldn’t keep the party unified” but also decided “to point the direction forward, and he pointed very clearly towards Vice-President Harris.
“And so I think that was a wise decision, and I think he’s executed it extremely well. You see the vice-president emerging in very short order as the consensus nominee of our party with strong backing … I think that’s great.
“… So I don’t really love how we got here, but I think we’re in a good place. We’re going to move forward. We’re going to win this year.”
