At times you need to hear news that’s hard to hear
WASHINGTON — David Axelrod is not a prick.
Truly.
I’ve known him since 2007 and if I had to pick a noun to describe him, it would be mensch.
So when President Joe Biden privately employs that epithet for Axelrod, according to Politico’s Jonathan Martin, it’s bad for a few reasons.
The ordinarily gracious president is punching down at the strategist who helped elevate him onto the ticket with Barack Obama in 2008 and who thinks he was “a great vice president” and has done a lot of wonderful things as president.
When some in the Obama camp chattered in 2011 about switching Biden out for Hillary Clinton, Axelrod said, he protested: “That would be an incredible act of disloyalty to a guy who has done a great job for us.”
Axelrod drew Biden’s ire because he urged the president to consider stopping at one term, throwing open the race to younger Democrats while there’s still time, and leaving as a hero. He said that, despite Biden’s insult, he got a slew of messages agreeing with him.
“I don’t care about them thinking I’m a prick — that’s fine,” the strategist told me. “I hope they don’t think the polls are wrong because they’re not.”
According to a New York Times/Siena College poll, Donald Trump is ahead in five battleground states and, as some other surveys have found, is even making inroads among Black voters and young voters. There’s a generational fracture in the Democratic Party over the Israeli-Hamas horror and Biden’s age. Third-party spoilers are circling.
The president turns 81 on Monday; the Oval hollows out its occupants quickly, and Biden is dealing with two world-shattering wars, chaos at the border, a riven party and a roiling country.
“I think he has a 50-50 shot here, but no better than that, maybe a little worse,” Axelrod said. “He thinks he can cheat nature here and it’s really risky. They’ve got a real problem if they’re counting on Trump to win it for them. I remember Hillary doing that, too.”
The president’s flash of anger indicates that he may be in denial, surrounded by enablers who are sugarcoating a grim political forecast.
Like other pols, Biden has a healthy ego and like all presidents, he’s truculent about not getting the credit he thinks he deserves for his accomplishments. And it must be infuriating that most of the age qualms are about him, when Trump is only a few years younger.
No doubt the president is having a hard time wrapping his mind around the idea that the 77-year-old Mar-a-Lago Dracula has risen from his gilded coffin even though he’s albatrossed with legal woes and seems more deranged than ever, referring to Democrats with the fascist-favored term “vermin” and plotting a second-term revengefest. Trump’s campaign slogan should be, “There will be blood.”
For Biden, this is about his identity. It’s what he has fought all his life for, even battling his way through “friendly fire,” as Hunter Biden told me, in the Obama White House, when some Obama aides undermined him. It must have been awful when Obama took his vice president to lunch and nudged him aside for Hillary to run in 2016. Biden craves the affirmation of being reelected. He doesn’t want to look like a guy who’s been driven from office.
But he should not indulge the Irish chip on his shoulder. He needs to gather the sharpest minds in his party and hear what they have to say, not engage in petty feuds.
If Trump manages to escape conviction in Jack Smith’s Washington case, which may be the only criminal trial that ends before the election, that’s going to turbocharge his campaign. Of course, if he’s convicted, that could turbocharge his campaign even more.
It’s a perfect playing field for the maleficent Trump: He learned in the 2016 race that physical and rhetorical violence could rev up his base. He told me at the time it helped get him to No. 1 and he said he found violence at his rallies exciting.
He has no idea why making fun of Paul Pelosi’s injuries at the hands of one of his acolytes is subhuman, any more than he understood how repellent it was in 2015 when he mocked a disabled Times reporter. He gets barbaric laughs somehow, and that’s all he cares about. In an interview with Jonathan Karl, Trump gloated about how his audience on Jan. 6 was “the biggest crowd I’ve ever spoken in front of by far.”
Never mind that it was one of the most dangerous, shameful days in our history. To Trump, it was glorious.
Maureen Dowd is a columnist for The New York Times.
It’s time to admit that I underestimated Nikki Haley.
When she began her presidential campaign, she seemed caught betwixt and between: too much of a throwback to pre-Trump conservatism to challenge Ron DeSantis for the leadership of a Trumpified party, but also too entangled with Donald Trump after her service in his administration to offer the fresh start that anti-Trump Republicans would be seeking.
If you wanted someone to attack Trump head-on with relish, Chris Christie was probably your guy. If you wanted someone with pre-Trump Republican politics but without much Trump-era baggage, Tim Scott seemed like the fresher face.
Haley is having her moment. She’s in second place in New Hampshire, tied with DeSantis in the most recent Des Moines Register-led poll in Iowa, and leading Joe Biden by more than either DeSantis or Trump in national polls. Big donors are fluttering her way, and there’s an emerging media narrative about how she’s proving the DeSantis campaign theory wrong and showing that you can thrive as a Republican without surrendering to Trumpism.
To be clear, do not think Haley has proved the DeSantis theory wrong. She is not polling anywhere close to the highs DeSantis hit during his stint as the Trump-slayer, and if you use the Register-led poll to game out a future winnowing, you see that her own voters would mostly go to DeSantis if she were to drop out — but if DeSantis drops out, a lot of his voters would go to Trump. As long as that’s the case, Haley might be able to consolidate 30-35% of the party, but the path to actually winning would be closed.
But credit where it’s due: Haley has knocked out Scott, passed Christie and challenged DeSantis by succeeding at a core aspect of presidential politics — presenting yourself as an appealing and charismatic leader who can pick public fights and come out the winner.
So in the spirit of not underestimating her, let’s try to imagine a scenario where Haley actually wins the nomination.
First, assume that ideological analysis of party politics is overrated, and that a candidate’s contingent success can yield irresistible momentum, stampeding voters in a way that polls
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