On the menu today: Democrats and their allies like the Lincoln Project are headed to battle stations, aiming to stop the No Labels independent-presidential-candidate effort before it can gain any traction. This includes some overwrought, and even possibly illegal, threats that “we are going to come at you with every gun we can possibly find.” Marianne Williamson ends her presidential campaign, reminding me of an odd, harsh exposé early in this presidential-election cycle. Meanwhile, President Biden continues to see dead people, describing recent conversations with the late French president François Mitterrand and former German chancellor Helmut Kohl. No wonder Biden is skipping the traditional Super Bowl Sunday interview. We’re about to witness the oddity of the first presidential-reelection campaign that aims to minimize how much the public sees the candidate.
Dems Go to the Mattresses
Are the Democrats and Biden’s allies scared? They sure act like they’re scared.
Back in December, Semafor reported that a coalition of Democratic and Republican anti-Trump groups was threatening anyone associated with the independent group No Labels, desperate to prevent the entry of a significant third candidate into this year’s general election. The quotes in the report made the groups sound like something out of The Godfather, warning that either a signature or brains would be on the contract:
The call, organized by the center-left Democratic group Third Way with the help of the progressive Move On, also included representatives of End Citizens United, the Lincoln Project, American Bridge, Public Citizen, and Reproductive Freedom for All. Attendees included prominent anti-Trump Republicans Sarah Longwell and Bill Kristol, former Democratic Sen. Doug Jones, and an aide to the Democratic billionaire Reid Hoffman, Dmitri Mehlhorn.
“Through every channel we have, to their donors, their friends, the press, everyone — everyone — should send the message: If you have one fingernail clipping of a skeleton in your closet, we will find it,” one speaker said during the call. “If you think you were vetted when you ran for governor, you’re insane. That was nothing. We are going to come at you with every gun we can possibly find. We did not do that with Jill Stein or Gary Johnson, we should have, and we will not make that mistake again.”
The group laid out plans to discourage a set of possible candidates, including: former Republican Reps. Liz Cheney and Will Hurd; sitting Republican Governors Doug Burgum of North Dakota and Chris Sununu of New Hampshire; former Republican governors Jon Huntsman of Utah and Larry Hogan of Maryland.
If only these folks could be half as tough against, say, Hamas, or human traffickers crossing our southern border.
Did no one on that call realize that when it comes to talking about presidential candidates, in our current era of political violence, boasting, “We are going to come at you with every gun we can possibly find” is a poor choice of words? Hey, which band played the hold music on that call?
(We don’t know who made that particular quote, but I notice that Rick Wilson of the Lincoln Project said of No Labels in April 2023, “They need to be burned to the [blanking] ground politically.”)
This morning, the Washington Post’s Michael Scherer reports:
The Democratic National Committee hired a new communications adviser last month to counter the third-party candidates, while outside groups working for Biden’s election have been having discussions about a new organization that could coordinate about the wide range of threats. . . .
That has prompted groups such as the Democratic opposition research effort American Bridge to reallocate staff to focus on third-party candidates, while other groups such as Third Way have launched major efforts to dissuade support for No Labels. Another group called Citizens to Save our Republic, led by former House minority leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.), called on all third-party candidates this week to sign a pledge to leave the race in six swing states by July 1 if they have not qualified in enough states to win the electoral college and have not polled competitively.
Biden allies have also discussed creating another organization to coordinate the anti-third-party efforts.
Remember, democracy dies in darkness, except when it gets attacked in broad daylight by the president’s allies, attempting to keep other candidates off the ballot. William Barr, the former attorney general, notes that a civil-rights statute makes it illegal for any ‘two or more persons [to] conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person . . . in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” What exactly would we call a group warning individuals that if they run for president, “We are going to come at you with every gun we can possibly find”?
I thought of those reports about threats and intimidation when I saw the news that Marianne Williamson, the new-age-guru-turned-long-shot-presidential contender, is suspending her presidential campaign and ending her Democratic primary challenge to President Biden:
The 71-year-old onetime spiritual adviser to Oprah Winfrey contemplated suspending her campaign last month after winning just 5,000 votes in New Hampshire’s primary, writing that she “had to decide whether now is the time for a dignified exit or continue on our campaign journey.”
Williamson ultimately opted to continue on for two more primaries, but won just 2 percent of the vote in South Carolina and about 3 percent in Nevada.
“I hope future candidates will take what works for them, drinking from the well of information we prepared,” Williamson wrote in announcing the end of her bid. “My team and I brought to the table some great ideas, and I will take pleasure when I see them live on in campaigns and candidates yet to be created.”
This is where the snarky people will answer, perhaps honestly, that they didn’t know Marianne Williamson was running for president this year. Note that in South Carolina, Williamson actually finished with more votes than Minnesota congressman Dean Phillips.
Back in March 2023, Politico ran a curious story that painted Williamson in a deeply unflattering light, reporting, “Interviews with 12 people who worked for Williamson during her 2020 presidential campaign paint a picture of a boss who can be verbally and emotionally abusive,” and “those interviewed say the best-selling author and spiritual adviser subjected her employees to unpredictable, explosive episodes of anger. They said Williamson could be cruel and demeaning to her staff and that her behavior went far beyond the typical stress of a grueling presidential cycle.” There were two named staffers in the piece; everyone else remained anonymous.
In the era of Trump, the revelation that a presidential candidate is hard on staff and yells a lot is an almost quaint form of scandal. I just hope that those former Williamson staffers landed on their feet and found a more agreeable workplace, perhaps in the office of Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar.
Perhaps that Politico piece was an opposition-research drop from the Biden campaign, maybe it wasn’t, but you don’t usually see attack profiles, based on anonymous quotes from disgruntled former staffers, written about the longest of longshot candidates. If I submitted a 1,500-word report, based on interviews with twelve staffers, breaking the news that Ryan Binkley likes to dance in a banana suit, my editors would put me in concussion protocol.
The Hiding President
If Biden’s staffers are so worried, you might think they would want to get the president out there, making the case for why he’s the best choice and why Americans shouldn’t vote for Trump, or Robert F. Kennedy Jr., or Cornel West, or anybody else.
For the second straight year, Joe Biden isn’t going to sit down for an interview with the network that is broadcasting the Super Bowl. CBS had told the White House that it would air three or four minutes of that interview during Super Bowl coverage. An estimated 115 million Americans watched the last Super Bowl.
We are told, by unnamed Biden advisers, that this is part of a deliberate strategy, either because “many voters — already exhausted from a bruising political season — simply want to tune into the game” (NBC News), or because “the value of the interview has dropped, given it has over the years shifted from a more lighthearted media opportunity to a politics-focused affair” (CNN). And hey, why would any president want to make the political case for himself before tens of millions of television viewers in an election year?
This has got to be the first White House that doesn’t want to reach the widest possible audience, ten months before Election Day. The television cameras are coming! Quick, hide the president!
Nah, that leaked explanation is horsepucky. There are two other explanations that are more plausible.
The first, aligning with the rarity of the president’s sit-down interviews and formal press conferences, is that Biden’s team just doesn’t trust him to speak off the cuff anymore. The 81-year-old Biden’s runaway mouth has gotten him in trouble plenty of times before — “minor incursion,” “you ain’t black,” etc. More recently, Biden has described meetings with two long-deceased European leaders — first referring to a recent meeting with French president François Mitterrand, who died in 1996, and then describing a talk about the January 6 riot with former German chancellor Helmut Kohl, who died in 2017. Apparently, the president does a lot of his best international diplomacy through a Ouija board.
Put Biden in a sit-down interview on Super Bowl Sunday, and there’s just too much danger of an impromptu call for regime change in Moscow, or a meandering soliloquy about how many interracial couples are in commercials these days.
The other explanation is that Biden just isn’t up, mentally and physically, to a television interview these days. He didn’t make any televised address to the nation when the U.S. launched airstrikes against the Houthis in January or against other Iranian proxy groups in Iraq and Syria earlier this month. Biden didn’t give any Election Night remarks as he romped to a landslide victory in the South Carolina Democratic primary. And Biden continues to do about one public event per day, five days a week, almost always between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.
We just don’t see as much of the U.S. president as we used to, and it’s extremely difficult to believe this is part of a deliberate media strategy. (Unless the Biden campaign has concluded that the best strategy is to minimize the visibility of the president. It’s not like the American people are going to forget that Joe Biden is the president.)
If Biden could do formal press conferences, he would be doing them. If he could do formal sit-down televised interviews — heck, we’d settle for radio or print interviews — he would do that, too. The fact that Biden no longer does these, and that his allies are floating the idea of skipping this autumn’s presidential debates, is evidence that the familiar, garrulous, spirited, “Malarkey!”-shouting Biden of yesteryear is gone. What’s left is an old man who mumbles and offers terse answers during his brief appearances before reporters on his way to Marine One.
Never mind the question of whether Joe Biden can handle the duties of the presidency over the next five years. His team is already inadvertently signaling to us that he can’t handle them now.
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, in that other Washington publication I write for . . .
Let’s see if this works. (Taps microphone.)
“Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are actually pod people cooked up in a lab by Pfizer, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderbergers and the Loch Ness Monster to get more Americans to watch the Super Bowl so that hypnotic subliminal messages embedded in the commercials will convince them to reelect Joe Biden.”
Fingers crossed — maybe it’ll go viral.
As I conclude, “In 2024, the consequences for public figures’ lying are reliably minor, often so inconsequential that they’re undetectable. But the consequences for being boring are severe.”