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An old article by White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre resurfaced on Wednesday amid a growing number of calls for President Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 race.
In the 2020 article, titled “What it’s like working for a doomed presidential candidate,” Jean-Pierre detailed her time working for former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards and former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY), whose careers were destroyed for having an affair and sexting a minor respectively.
OMG — this is real
From @PressSec
“You deliberately put pep in your voice. “Everything is going great!” we would blatantly lie to the movers and shakers we were calling. But the more we tried, the less it helped.” https://t.co/p4oAjZWs8p pic.twitter.com/8p3WEuJI8k
— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) July 3, 2024
“One thing no one needed to tell me was that Edwards and his message were not connecting with voters,” wrote Jean-Pierre in the Salon article, which was an extract from her 2019 book. “Between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, another white male candidate was as enticing as a bowl of cold grits. The polls showed it, the commentators were noting it, and my gut told me. In no uncertain terms.”
She continued:
There’s nothing more dispiriting than working on a dying campaign. The atmosphere resembles one of those sad birthday balloons with the air slowly seeping out as it deflates. You show up at the office. You’re pumped. You attack the phones. You deliberately put pep in your voice. “Everything is going great!” we would blatantly lie to the movers and shakers we were calling. But the more we tried, the less it helped.
The article resurfaced on Wednesday as Jean-Pierre and others in the Biden campaign continue to dismiss concerns about Biden’s cognitive capabilities and reject the growing number of calls from Democrats for Biden to drop out of the race against former President Donald Trump.
Since Biden’s disastrous performance against Trump in CNN’s first presidential debate last week, several prominent Democrats and media figures have called on Biden to drop out of the race, including former Obama administration HUD Secretary Julián Castro, Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX), and former Democratic National Committee Executive Committee member James Zogby.
Despite growing concern over Biden’s ability to defeat Trump in the 2024 election, however, the president has refused calls to withdraw from the race, and Jean-Pierre has repeatedly defended her employer from the scrutiny of the press corps.
“He is as sharp as ever,” she claimed this week, sticking to the excuse that the reason for Biden’s poor debate performance – which saw him ramble incoherently and look like “a deer in headlights” – was due to a common cold and jet lag from a trip nearly two weeks prior.
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