A senior adviser to Democrat Joe Biden in his campaign for president 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”, while the US staggered with the impact of the pandemic amid hospitals that stretched to the collapse and the number of deaths increasing and the economy falling off a cliff.
The remark, made to “an associate” by Anita Dunn, a Washington power broker that the Atlantic called “Biden’s non-drama approach to Trump”, is reported in Lucky: How Joe Biden barely 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 Covid’s 500,000th death in the United States with a solemn ceremony and a plea 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 quick story of Hillary Clinton’s White House management in 2016. In their new book, they record Biden’s view of his predecessor in his defeat for Trump – he considered her a “bad candidate” – and the opinions of Barack Obama, to whom Biden was vice president from 2009 to 2017, in the course of the 2020 campaign.
Obama first “seemed to be in love with a former Texas congressman, Beto O’Rourke,” write Allen and Parnes, then told Biden’s advisers that he feared that his 77-year-old friend when the primaries started could only embarrass himself. even and tarnish a distinguished career in Washington.
But Dunn’s reported comment points to what has become the dominant theme of the election. While the pandemic was turning Trump along with the economy, Biden, through a much more cautious approach to the campaign and basic public health concerns, appealed to voters as the right man to manage a recovery.
Trump tried to hit Biden for “hiding in his basement” – a reference to Biden’s decision to rarely leave his home in Wilmington, Delaware, rather than campaigning virtually while the president held rallies and ignored public health guidelines. But these attacks did not hit the target.
Although “both Trump and Biden were comfortable with the stylistic and substantive contrasts of their … responses to the coronavirus,” Allen and Parnes write, “Trump led loudly, Biden calmly said that Trump cheated.”
Like many members of his family and inner circle, Trump contracted the virus. He would be more seriously ill than was admitted publicly. Biden remained healthy and won the electoral college 306-232 and the popular vote for 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 did not take a position in the Biden government and, according to her own consultancy, SKDK, is “currently on leave … It is expected to return later this year ”.
According to the profile published by Atlantic shortly after Biden’s victory in November, Dunn “came of age at a time when advisers were not seen or heard … and still values discretion above all.”