Weak, obscure challenge to Biden sets off Democratic war
Byron York
WEAK, OBSCURE CHALLENGE TO BIDEN SETS OFF DEMOCRATIC WAR. Have you heard of Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN)? Most people haven’t. He is a Democratic member of Congress from Minnesota’s 3rd District, which includes the suburbs around Minneapolis. Fifty-four years old, he has been in office since January 2019. He has not done anything particularly remarkable in that time, although he is usually listed as one of the 25 wealthiest members of Congress, mostly from investments of family money.
Now he is running for president, declaring his candidacy today in New Hampshire. That is newsworthy because Phillips is a Democrat challenging Democratic President Joe Biden. It’s also newsworthy because Phillips appears to agree with Biden about almost everything. Phillips voted with the Biden position 100% of the time from the president’s inauguration through the end of 2022, according to FiveThirtyEight’s vote tracker.
Nevertheless, Phillips said something about Biden’s presidency is not working. “We, America’s exhausted majority, know that something has gone terribly wrong,” Phillips said in his announcement speech. He worries about government debt. He worries about people living paycheck to paycheck. He worries about gun violence, healthcare, crime, mental health, the border, and inflation (Phillips wants to “Make America Affordable Again”). He says he can win the 2024 election — he doesn’t believe Biden can — and that “it’s time for the torch to be passed to a new generation of American leaders.”
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In his speech, Phillips did not mention the 80-year-old Biden by name but did say that he is running “not in opposition to our current president, who has my appreciation and gratitude.” Of course, Phillips is running in opposition to Biden. That’s how it works. But he is trying to soften the impact, perhaps to his own political future, of challenging a sitting president of his own party.
A lot of Democrats are furious at Phillips for challenging Biden. For example, the Democratic governor of Phillips’s own state, Minnesota, signed on to a Biden fundraising appeal to coincide with Phillips’s announcement. “You know, I have to say this about Minnesota: it’s a great state, full of great people. And sometimes they do crazy things,” Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) wrote. “And sometimes … they make political side shows for themselves.”
“[Phillips’s] entry has to be among the most clueless I’ve ever seen,” Joe Trippi, a longtime Democratic strategist, told the Washington Post. And another Democratic operative in Phillips’s home state told Politico: “Everyone I know, to a person, is mystified, perplexed, and frustrated by this move, and Dean has not really offered any public explanation. People here are all in on Biden and focused on the work to get him reelected.”
The concern, of course, is that Phillips’s candidacy might help former President Donald Trump win a second term in the White House. Everything in Democratic circles these days is about keeping Trump out of the White House. So now, some of Trump’s most virulent adversaries are now virulent adversaries of Phillips.
Remember the Lincoln Project? It was a group of former Republican operatives who hated Trump to the core of their being and found a way to make it pay for them. It turned its organization into a fundraising juggernaut, pulling in tens of millions from Hollywood liberals and small donors alike. It used it to make ads designed to get under Trump’s skin. And the operatives used it to make themselves quite rich. One co-founder, Steve Schmidt, was fond of saying the Lincoln Project would bring him “generational wealth.”
The Lincoln Project fell apart amid allegations of misconduct, backbiting, and, most of all, fights about money. Have you heard the phrase “two scorpions in a bottle”? Well, it was a bunch of scorpions in a bottle.
Now, Schmidt, who quit the Lincoln Project amid all the fighting, is “advising Phillips’s campaign and is intimately involved in Friday’s launch,” according to the Washington Post. (Schmidt has often worked for candidates who had extensive personal wealth.) Meanwhile, back at the Lincoln Project — these days it’s a pro-Democratic organization loyal to Biden — it’s going after Phillips. Phillips “should keep his ego at home so he can see what real leadership looks like when it comes to town,” the Lincoln Project posted on X, formerly Twitter. “This entire ‘Make America Affordable Again’ scampaign is one big vanity project money grab.”
“There’s delusion, and then there’s #DeanQuixote,” posted another Lincoln Project co-founder, Reed Galen. And yet another Lincoln Project operative, Rick Wilson, said he is “planning to take the bark off Dean Phillips…It’ll be fun.”
The notable thing about the whole controversy is that much of what Phillips is saying is true. Of course it is time for a new generation of American leaders. Of course the public’s standard of living has declined under Biden. Of course Biden’s border policy has been a disaster. These things are self-evidently true. And most importantly, of course Biden is too old to be president, something Phillips can’t bring himself to say in so many words.
While all that is true, the Democratic establishment has dutifully fallen in line behind the elderly president, each operative and officeholder afraid his or her future in the party will be damaged if they admit the obvious. That makes it highly unlikely the Dean Phillips campaign will ever go anywhere. But it will still be revealing.
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