President Trump told The Hill that Joe Biden was lying about his lack of a 2020 endorsement from President Obama.
Said Trump: “How he doesn’t get President Obama to endorse him? There has to be some reason why he’s not endorsing him… He was the vice president. They seemed to have gotten along. President Obama not endorsing him is rather… a big secret.”
He added: “Then he goes and lies and says I asked the president not to endorse me… give me a break.”
“It is not a tenable strategy… His message is that he’s the guy who can beat Donald Trump and he is viewed as the least risky choice. Over time, if the only interactions he has is around these screwups and gaffes, then he is going to start losing that message.”
— David Axelrod, quoted by the Daily Beast, saying Joe’s Biden’s media avoidance strategy isn’t viable.
“I don’t think the remarks are offensive. During the height of the civil rights movement we worked with people and got to know people that were members of the klan…We never gave up on our fellow human being.”
— Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), defending Joe Biden’s remarks saying he worked with segregationist senators “to get things done.”
James Hohmann: “Hillary Clinton called half of Donald Trump’s supporters ‘a basket of deplorables.’ Mitt Romney claimed 47 percent of the country would never vote for him because they are ‘dependent upon government.’ Barack Obama said ‘bitter’ working-class people in the Rust Belt ‘cling to guns or religion.'”
“Joe Biden’s paean to a bygone era — during which he spoke wistfully about working collegially and civilly with racists to find areas of common ground — seems destined to enter this pantheon of campaign-defining gaffes.”
“The latest donnybrook illustrates why Biden has been the least directly accessible to the press of all the 2020 candidates, including President Trump. Biden has been doing fewer public events than his top-tier rivals, preferring to focus on raising money from high-dollar donors. He’s given virtually no sit-down interviews and submitted to relatively few gaggles. “
New York Times: “In ways big and small, Biden’s choices underscore his determination to play by his own rules in the Democratic primary, gambling that his widespread name recognition and status as early poll-leader free him to set a pace and tone sharply distinct from his competitors. And as his decades-long record in government comes under increasing criticism from his party’s left flank, Mr. Biden keeps bringing attention back to November 2020.”
“That emphasis on Mr. Trump — and brushoff of his opponents — is the right approach for Mr. Biden right now, many political veterans say. Whether he can maintain that strategy is another question, as other candidates intensify their attacks on him, and some gain ground in key early-voting states like Iowa.”
Anita Hill told NBC News that “of course” she would vote for Joe Biden over President Trump in 2020.
Washington Post: “Hill said her criticisms of Biden do not mean she sees any moral equivalency between him and President Trump, who has been accused by more than a dozen women of sexual assault — allegations the president has denied.”
Kevin Drum: “I have no idea what Joe Biden ‘really’ believes about working with Republicans. But I will say this: he’s a politician. There’s zero reason to think he truly believes what he’s saying here. There’s also zero reason to think he doesn’t believe it. The fact that he said it is simply a null input.”
“At the same time, Biden isn’t an idiot. Of course he knows what the modern Republican Party is like. But like Obama before him, he also knows that lots of people really like to hear paeans to bipartisanship. We political junkies may hate it, but ordinary people who don’t inhale cable news are suckers for the idea that we can all get along if we just give it a try—and there are way more of them than there are of us. Biden knows this, so that’s what he tells people. Whether he really believes it or not matters not a whit.”
Joe Biden once voted to restore the U.S. citizenship of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, the Washington Examiner reports.
“The former vice president was a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee that unanimously approved a bill in 1977. The measure was sent to the full Senate, where it was approved without dissent and later signed into law by President Jimmy Carter.”
“The initiatives, which generated relatively little controversy at the time, highlights the cultural and political shifts that have taken place during Biden’s nearly five-decade political career.”
“With Trump gone you’re going to begin to see things change. Because these folks know better. They know this isn’t what they’re supposed to be doing.”
— Joe Biden, quoted by the Daily Beast, on being able to work with Republicans.
Daily Beast: “Since the end of May, Fox Business Network and Fox News star Lisa ‘Kennedy’ Montgomery and Fox News primetime host Sean Hannity have speculated on-air, on at least four separate occasions, that the current Democratic presidential frontrunner is secretly dealing with health issues, often comparing his condition to illness-related conspiracy theories the network pushed about Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election.”
“The Biden rumor-mongering seemingly began May 29, during the broadcast of Fox News’ afternoon gabfest The Five. While assessing Biden’s candidacy, Kennedy claimed to know Democratic operatives engaged in a whisper campaign about Biden’s health.”
First Read: “It started with that sloppy climate plan rollout — the Biden campaign admitting that it forgot to give proper attribution to some passages in it. (The toplines were also almost identical to Beto O’Rourke’s climate plan.)”
“Then came the pile-on from his Democratic rivals after NBC News reported that the former vice president continued to support the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal funds for abortion services except in the cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother.”
“And then last night, Biden reversed course, saying he now opposes the Hyde Amendment — after supporting it for decades.”
The Atlantic: “Biden has told friends that part of the reason for sticking to an ultra-light schedule is to create more time for debate prep, which for him tends to be less about conducting mock sessions and role-playing than digging into briefing books. This will likely hold: Biden’s aides are not convinced that any kind of interaction he’d have at a town hall or other event is comparable to what’s awaiting him onstage. His campaign staffers expect the debates to either crystallize his top spot, or turn the primary into less of a marathon with Biden out ahead and more like two dozen Slinkies tumbling down a flight of stairs.”
Said one adviser: “This is not a debate. It’s not going to be structured as a debate. It is 10 candidates in a joint appearance with press moderators.”
Jonathan Swan: “Trump allies say that when 2020 candidates to Biden’s left inevitably start hitting him on his free-trade past, Republicans will piggyback to try to undermine him ahead of a potential general election fight in the Rust Belt.”
“Expect them to begin asking questions like: What specifically will Biden do with China? Will he lift President Trump’s tariffs? How does Biden defend his past advocacy for NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership?”
Business Insider reports that multiple sentences in Joe Biden’s new climate change proposal “appear to lift passages from letters and websites for different organizations.”
“The copied sentences are particularly notable due to Biden’s past history of plagiarism, which played a major role in tanking his 1988 presidential campaign.”
David Byler: “When Joe Biden first entered the presidential race, he was supposed to be a Jeb Bush redux — a relic of a bygone era who would quickly be swept away by candidates who appealed to the party’s insurgent wing. But so far that hasn’t happened — instead Biden enjoyed a solid post-announcement bounce in the polls and now leads his closest competitor, Bernie Sanders, by double digits. That prompted some to make the opposite case, and Biden became Hillary Clinton — an establishment-backed, well-resourced, Barack Obama-affiliated, lifetime Democrat fighting against the progressives.”
“But Biden isn’t either of these politicians. He’s not nearly as dominant as Clinton, who scared off almost all of her competitors in 2016. So far, Biden’s candidacy has failed to intimidate even Eric Swalwell. Unlike Bush, Biden is arguably more in step with contemporary Democrats, both on substance and style, than Bush was. Instead, Biden is more like Mitt Romney: a poll leader and plausible nominee who seems acceptable to the party establishment but faces some big obstacles in his quest for the nomination.”
“We’ve already had five, just this year, five black transgender women killed violently in 2019 — that’s outrageous. It must, it must, it must end. And the fastest way to end it is, end the Trump administration.”
— Joe Biden, quoted by CNN.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.