Anita Dunn still has no regrets about holding an early debate between US President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, and continues to dispute the idea that Biden's performance was a "disaster" for voters, and she also suggested that the US President left the election race against his will after facing opposition from "hawks" of the Democratic Party such as Nancy Pelosi and former President Barack Obama.

“We had people calling us all the time to tell him he should walk away. He wasn’t ready to do that,” the former Biden adviser told Politico, arguing that, contrary to what his Democratic opponents had suggested about his inability to move forward, Biden was able to continue his campaign and lead the country for another four years.

Dunn was asked about a letter the US president sent to lawmakers saying he would not drop out of the race, which she acknowledged backfired on some members of Congress.

She noted that after it became clear that Biden could no longer run, he "made it very clear that the second best person was his running mate. And that's where we are now."

“Voters didn’t particularly like Biden’s performance in the first half of the debate,” Dunn said of the debate. “He wasn’t doing very well at all. But it’s not like they changed their mind about him.” She added: “They really liked Joe Biden’s second half of the debate. They hated Donald Trump.”

But the fallout was devastating. If the campaign’s goal was to turn the race into a choice between Trump and Biden rather than a referendum on the president, it backfired. Still, even in the weeks since the debate, Dunn has believed Biden can hold on.

She knew Biden at his darkest political moment during the 2020 campaign — after he lost the first three primaries and his chances seemed to be fading — and helped him turn things around in South Carolina. She says the press, pundits and politicians have always underestimated him.

Repeated scenario

In fact, Dunn and the Biden team believed they had “seen this movie” before, and developed a strategy to outmaneuver the media and party hawks who had abandoned the president, and then bet that everyone would forget about the debate.

But this time was different. Unlike the Biden team, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Barack Obama, and Hakeem Jeffries never bought into the “Biden myth.”

Dunn’s work for Biden is over, but she’s still contributing to the Democratic campaign, working to help Kamala Harris win the presidency. In her interview with Politico, Dunn discussed Biden’s final days as a candidate, Harris’s new political opportunities, and much more.

The former advisor to the US president accused the leaders of the Democratic Party, as well as the major media, of launching "horrific" attacks against Biden, who announced his withdrawal from the upcoming presidential election race.

Dunn, who recently left the White House to join the Harris campaign, spoke in an unprecedented interview about the fallout from the disastrous presidential debate, in which Biden stumbled over a number of answers and ultimately led to his replacement in the presidential race by his running mate, Kamala Harris.

The debate was bad, but not disastrous.

Dunn said the debate itself wasn’t all that bad, but what followed was crucial. “(Former President) Trump didn’t gain any ground in the debate at all,” she said. “We did gain some votes. So it was a bad debate, but it wasn’t a disaster at all, certainly from a voter’s perspective.”

“I think other people who have done independent research have seen pretty much the same thing,” she added. “If you go back and look at the polls, you don’t see much movement at all that comes out of the debate because the structure of this campaign has been pretty consistent for so long, and the debate didn’t change that.”

“What changed that was 24 days of terrible, continuous negative attacks on Joe Biden,” she continued. When asked where the attacks came from, Dunn did not hesitate to respond: “His party and the press.”

She also said that after that debate there were “relentlessly negative” headlines, exacerbated by the party leaders’ statements. “Clearly there were leaders in the party who decided to go ahead and come out,” she said. “That gave permission for other people to come out as well.”

Asked if an example of that was when former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., appeared on television twice in the days following the debate, Dunn said, “Absolutely.”

Dunn later sidestepped a question about whether Biden was still angry with Pelosi, as well as former President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. — while also taking another jab at some leaders.

“The task ahead of us is to win this election and not let Donald Trump become president again and to win the House of Representatives, which we had some leaders in 2022 who did a little bit better job of, maybe we would have controlled today, but we don’t,” she said.

Tensions had been building within the Biden camp before he announced his withdrawal from the presidential race. NBC News reported that tensions escalated after the debate, with Biden family members debating whether to fire Dan, angered by her suggestion that Biden's son Hunter Biden should stay out of the spotlight.

Dunn was asked about a letter the president sent to lawmakers saying he would not drop out of the race, which she acknowledged backfired on some members. Asked if Hunter was responsible for the situation, she said, "That's not true."

Source: Al Sharq Channel