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A senior adviser to Democrat Joe Biden in his presidential campaign felt that “Covid is the best thing that has ever happened to him,” reports a new book.
It was, the authors add, a necessarily private comment that “campaign officials believed but would never say in public” as the United States recovered from the impact of the pandemic amid shrinking hospitals. were stretching to rupture and with increasing deaths and the economy falling off a cliff.
The remark, made to “an associate” by Anita Dunn, a Washington power broker who the Atlantic has called “the mastermind behind Biden’s no-drama approach to Trump,” is reported in Lucky: How Joe Biden Got to barely won the presidency, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.
The first major book on the 2020 election, an indelible campaign marked by the coronavirus, will be published next week. The guard got a copy.
This week, President Biden commemorated the 500,000th death of the American Covid with a solemn ceremony and a call for Americans to “remember those we have lost and those we have left behind.”
Allen and Parnes, of NBC News and The Hill, also collaborated on Shattered, an equally swift story of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 White House race. In their new book, they record Biden’s take on his predecessor during his loss to Trump – he thought her a “terrible candidate” – and the perspective of Barack Obama, of whom Biden served as vice president from 2009 to 2017, as the 2020 campaign unfolded.
Obama first “seemed in love with former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke,” Allen and Parnes write, then later told Biden’s aides he feared his friend, 77, at the start of primary, only succeeds in embarrassing himself and tarnishing a distinguished career in Washington.
But Dunn’s reported comments indicate what has become the dominant theme of the election. As the pandemic capsized, Trump with the economy, Biden, thanks to a much more cautious approach to campaigning and basic public health concerns, called out voters as the ideal man to manage a recovery.
Trump sought to hammer Biden for “hiding in his basement” – a reference to Biden’s decision to rarely leave his home in Wilmington, Delaware, instead campaigning virtually while the president held rallies and ignored public health guidelines. But these attacks did not hit the house.
Although “Trump and Biden are both comfortable with the stylistic and substantial contrasts in their … responses to the coronavirus,” Allen and Parnes write, “Trump led loudly, Biden calmly said that Trump had misled.”
Like many of his family and entourage, Trump contracted the virus. He would have been more seriously ill than has been publicly admitted. Biden remained healthy and won Electoral College 306-232 and the popular vote of over 7 million.
Dunn, 63, is a veteran of six Democratic and three winning campaigns, having worked for Obama in 2008 and 2012. She did not play a role in the Biden administration and according to her own consulting firm, SKDK, is “currently on leave … Expected to return later this year”.
According to the profile released by the Atlantic the day after Biden’s victory in November, Dunn “came of age when assistants were neither seen nor heard … and still values ​​discretion above all else.”
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