‘Go Away!’ Battered Democrats Beg Biden to Stop Talking as He Embarks on Media Tour
Former President Joe Biden’s return to the media circuit is causing Democratic operatives to openly beg him to exit stage left – especially if he wants to keep revisiting the party’s 2024 election defeat to President Donald Trump.
Biden said he took “responsibility” for Trump’s win during an interview on ABC’s The View on Thursday, sitting alongside Jill Biden, but the mea culpa that has only prompted some Democrats to drop the niceties and outright demand he “go away.”
In an article by Politico on Monday several Democratic activists, of varying degrees of sympathy for Biden, were united by one point: it’s time to move on.
“It’s time for Joe Biden to go away with all due respect,” said Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha. “Every time he appears on a show or says something, it’s just another week or a month that we have to defend him and remind everybody that we got beat by Donald Trump, again.”
“For those of us trying to rebuild the brand, it does no good when you’re constantly reminded about the old brand that won’t go away,” he added.
Amanda Litman of Run For Something was equally as scathing: “Every interview that Biden does drags us backwards and reminds people of the older generation of Democrats that got us into this mess – when attention is our scarcest resource, we need to prioritize hearing from the next generation of leaders who could excite and rebuild the party.”
Biden’s re-emergence in the mediasphere comes just weeks before the release of an impending tell-all, Original Sin, written by CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson. The book promises fresh details about Biden’s reelection bid “despite evidence of his serious decline” – a potentially brutal rearview moment as the party tries to reinvent itself.
Strategist Ashley Etienne, however, argued Biden can still “add value” if constructive and noted, no matter how others wanted to just move on, that the party needed to independently set the record on what happened – or the record would be set for it.
“I think this is an incredible inflection point as a nation, as a world and people like Joe Biden add value to the conversation — when [he’s focused] on being constructive,” said Etienne.
“I do believe we’ve got to reconcile what actually happened, be honest about it, confront it and move past it. I think central to that … would be an autopsy from the party,” she added. “Absent that, then you got all these books that are going to fill in the gaps and the holes and it’s going to keep perpetuating the problem and deepening the wound.”
