A senior adviser to Democrat Joe Biden in his campaign for president believed “Covid is the best thing that ever happened to him,” reports a new book.
It was, the authors add, a necessarily personal comment that “campaign officials believed but would never say publicly,” as the US teetered from the impact of the pandemic amid rampant hospitals and with increasing deaths and an economy of a cliff fell.
The remark, made to “a co-worker” by Anita Dunn, a Washington power broker who was dubbed by the Atlantic “The Mastermind Behind Biden’s No-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 scarred by the corona virus, will be published next week. The Guardian has obtained a copy.
This week, President Biden commemorated Covid’s 500,000th death in the US with a solemn ceremony asking Americans to “remember who we lost and those we left behind.”
Allen and Parnes, of NBC News and The Hill, also contributed to Shattered, an equally rapid history of Hillary Clinton’s White House run in 2016. In their new book, they capture Biden’s vision of his predecessor in her defeat to Trump – he considered her a “Terrible candidate” – and the views of Barack Obama, who was Biden’s vice president from 2009 to 2017, as the 2020 campaign unfolded.
Obama first appeared “in love with a former Texas congressman, Beto O’Rourke,” write Allen and Parnes, and later told Biden’s aides that he feared his friend, aged 77 when the primary began, would be alone in it. manage to self-embarrass and distinguished careers in Washington.
But Dunn’s reported comment points to what became the dominant theme of the election. As the pandemic capsized Trump along with the economy, by taking a much more cautious approach to campaigns and basic public health concerns, Biden hailed voters as the right man to manage a recovery.
Trump tried to hammer Biden for “ hiding in his basement ” – a reference to Biden’s decision to rarely leave the house in Wilmington, Delaware, instead virtually campaigning while the president held rallies and ignored public health guidelines. But such attacks did not strike.
While “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 said calmly that Trump was misleading.”
Like many members of his family and inner circle, Trump contracted the virus. He was reportedly more seriously ill than publicly admitted. Biden remained healthy, winning the electoral college 306-232 and the popular vote by more than 7 million.
Dunn, 63, is a veteran of six Democratic campaigns and three winning campaigns who worked for Obama in 2008 and 2012. She has not taken on a role in Biden’s government and, according to her own consultancy SKDK, “is currently on leave. … Expected to return later this year ”.
According to the profile published by the Atlantic in the immediate aftermath of Biden’s November victory, Dunn “came of age in the days when assistants were not seen or heard … and still values discretion above all else.”