A senior adviser to Democrat Joe Biden in his campaign for the presidency believed that “Covid is the best thing that 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 reeling from the impact of the pandemic amid collapsing hospitals and deaths soared and the economy slumped. .
The comment, made to “an associate” by Anita Dunn, a Washington powerhouse whom the Atlantic called “The mastermind behind Biden’s no-drama approach to Trump,” is reported in Lucky: How Joe Biden Just Won the Presidency, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.
The first major book on the 2020 elections, a campaign indelibly marked by the coronavirus, will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.
This week, President Biden commemorated the 500,000th death of Covid in the US with a solemn ceremony and a request for Americans to “remember those we lost and those we left behind.”
Allen and Parnes of NBC News and The Hill also collaborated on Shattered, an equally fast-paced history of Hillary Clinton’s run in the White House in 2016. In their new book, they record Biden’s take on his predecessor in his loss to Trump. : He considered her a “Terrible Candidate” – and the views of Barack Obama, whom Biden served as Vice President from 2009 to 2017, as the 2020 campaign unfolded.
Obama first “seemed to have a crush on a former Texas congressman, Beto O’Rourke,” Allen and Parnes write, and then he told Biden’s aides he feared his friend, 77 when the primaries began, would only embarrass himself himself and tarnish a distinguished career in Washington.
But Dunn’s informed comment points to what became the dominant theme of the election. When the pandemic sank Trump along with the economy, Biden, through a much more cautious approach to campaigning and basic public health concerns, appealed to voters as the right man to manage the recovery.
Trump tried to criticize Biden for “hiding in his basement,” a reference to Biden’s decision to rarely leave home in Wilmington, Delaware, instead of virtually campaigning while the president held demonstrations and ignored public health guidelines. . But such attacks did not hit the mark.
While “both Trump and Biden were comfortable with the stylistic and substantive contrasts of their … responses to the coronavirus,” write Allen and Parnes, “Trump led out loud, Biden calmly said Trump cheated.”
Like many members of his family and inner circle, Trump contracted the virus. He was reportedly more seriously ill than was publicly admitted. Biden stayed healthy and won the 306-232 electoral college and the popular vote by more than 7 million.
Dunn, 63, is a veteran of six Democratic campaigns and three winners, having worked for Obama in 2008 and 2012. She has not assumed a role in the Biden administration and, according to her own consultancy, SKDK, is “currently on leave. ”. … He is expected to return later this year ”.
According to the profile published by the Atlantic immediately after Biden’s victory in November, Dunn “came of age by the time the helpers were neither seen nor heard … and he still values discretion above almost everything”.