Too bad this memo went to Joe Biden unsigned. The most momentous political document of the 2024 cycle really should get more credit than just to “Senior Advisors” of the Biden re-election campaign.
If any of them want to step forward and claim their Wrong-Way Riegels Award For Own-Goal of the Year, please drop us a note here at Hot Air, or at Politico Playbook. The authors of a new book about the 2024 election cycle got a copy of the memo but not its specific authors, the so-called brain trust that urged Biden into an early debate against Donald Trump to shape the battleground well ahead of early voting.
And hey, that much got accomplished! Credit where credit’s due, right?
This morning, Playbook readers can read the actual six-page memo that convinced President Joe Biden to push for an early debate with Donald Trump last June. And a quick trigger warning: Dems may prefer to read it through their fingers.
With friends like these: In the ill-fated briefing document, dated April 15, 2024, Biden’s senior advisers told him not to wait for the autumn dates proposed by the Commission on Presidential Debates — the first of which, they noted, was scheduled after mail-in ballots would start going out — but instead to arrange a head-to-head with Trump within a matter of weeks. The memo was obtained by journalists Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf, in the process of reporting their new book, “2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America,” which is out tomorrow.
Read it and weep: “By holding the first debate in the spring, YOU will be able to reach the widest audience possible,” Biden’s top aides told him — and by the way, every reference to Biden is written in attention-grabbing all-caps and bold — “before we are deep in the summer months with the conventions, Olympics and family vacations taking precedence. In addition, the earlier YOU are able to debate the better, so that the American people can see YOU standing next to Trump and showing the strength of YOUR leadership, compared to Trump’s weakness and chaos.”
Trump’s weakness and chaos? Isn’t that cute? By this point, Biden could barely get through a prewritten speech and needed to have someone guide him off stages. In April 2024, these geniuses still thought Trump was weak.
The memo doesn’t list its authors, but it does name at least two of Biden’s “senior advisors” pushing him to the disastrous early debate:
After further discussion, YOUR Senior Advisors, including Ron and Cedric, continue to believe it is important to move forward with a plan that supports YOUR participation in debates as early as possible, with the following goals in mind:
“Ron and Cedric” are Ron Klain and Cedric Richmond, clearly. Klain had been Biden’s chief of staff for the first two years of the Biden Regency. It’s not clear whether Klain had a formal role in Biden’s re-election campaign; by that time, Klain had gone back into private practice and then became Airbnb’s chief legal officer, where he still works. Richmond, however, was Biden’s campaign co-chair and had been a “senior advisor” to Biden during the presidential term as well. Both of these men should have known better by April 2024 than to put Biden on stage with Trump at all, let alone at 9 pm ET, for a debate.
This does answer one question, though. At the time, when the rest of us were scratching our heads over this plan, we wondered whether this was some kind of a head-fake in anticipation of convictions in Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of Trump. The only sense any of us could make of the obvious risk of putting a senile man on stage was that it was a way to allow Biden to eventually refuse to take the stage with a “convicted felon.” Biden never took advantage of that opportunity, of course, and the rest is history, but the memo shows that Biden’s “senior advisors” seriously thought Biden could hold the stage against anyone, let alone Trump — even though they had kept Biden away from reporters and open press conferences for months leading up to that memo.
Klain later discovered his error, according to a different book, but apparently too late:
Klain, the White House chief of staff from 2021 to 2023, was “startled” by Biden’s declining mental and physical state when he went back to work for the octogenarian president in June 2024, according to excerpts from Chris Whipple’s upcoming book Uncharted published in the Guardian.
Klain had “never seen [Biden] so exhausted and out of it,” Whipple writes. “Biden was unaware of what was happening in his own campaign. Halfway through the session, the president excused himself and went off to sit by the pool.” …
Klain had to cut short the two mock debates he had organized for Biden.
“The first was scheduled to last 90 minutes but Klain called it off after 45. The president’s voice was shot and so was his grasp of the subject,” Whipple writes. Less than 30 minutes into the second mock debate, Biden went off to bed, saying he was “just too tired to continue,” according to Whipple.
And … no one thought that might be a sign to reconsider the debate? Or even more fundamentally: Why didn’t this raise immediate concerns about Biden’s cognitive capacity in relation to the job at that time, let alone for another four years?
Instead, these “Senior Advisors” sent Biden out on stage, and, well … let’s just say that they didn’t do their boss any favors, or themselves either. It is tough to imagine how any political campaign memo could have been more catastrophically wrong.
At least, it’s impossible to imagine until we get the inside memos from the Kamala Harris campaign. I’d bet those would at least get an honorable mention — especially any that promoted Governor JazzHands McSnitchLine over Josh Shapiro as running mate.
