Listening to Dean Phillips on Face the Nation. He’s saying he still endorses Biden and but is hoping he steps aside. He’s calling for a secret ballot in Congress among Democrats to see how many do want Biden to step aside as a message to Biden.
Pretty good piece on Dean Phillips and the fallout as the only elected Democrat to warn about Biden's condition. Hopefully this means Dean Phillips political future isn't over as I still think he would make a good Senator or Governor at some point. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/23/us/politics/dean-phillips-biden.html For Dean Phillips, Biden’s Withdrawal Offers ‘Unfulfilling’ Vindication The congressman from Minnesota waged a quixotic challenge in the Democratic primaries, warning that the president was too old to win. No one paid attention then. They are now. For Dean Phillips, the modern Cassandra of American politics, this I-told-you-so moment brings no joy. A little vindication, yes. Sadness, too, and sympathy for a man who gave his life to public service and deserved a better finale. But when it comes down to it, Mr. Phillips did tell everyone so, even though no one listened. He said early and often that President Biden was too old to run again, that he could not win, that the Democrats should find someone else to lead them into the election. When no one else picked up the mantle, he tried himself, only to be alternately ignored or pilloried. So when Mr. Biden stunned the world by pulling out of the race on Sunday, it was a bittersweet moment. Mr. Phillips could tell himself that he had tried to warn the party and at least some people remembered. By the end of the day, his phone had blown up with 1,276 text messages. He could not help wondering what would have happened had Mr. Biden made this decision 18 months ago. “Vindication,” he said, “has never felt so unfulfilling.” The story of Dean Phillips certainly looks different today than it did even a month ago. Until the world saw a frail and fumbling president on the debate stage on June 27, Mr. Phillips was a little-known third-term congressman from Minnesota whose long-shot challenge of Mr. Biden in the Democratic primaries had been dismissed as a quixotic exercise. Now it looks a little more prophetic. The point, he said, was to raise the alarm, not to advance his own ambitions. “My mission was to be a Paul Revere, not a George Washington,” he said. “I think that’s been accomplished.” Mr. Phillips sat down at a Washington hotel on Sunday to discuss his journey just 90 minutes before Mr. Biden announced that he was pulling out. The congressman had just come from the studio of CBS News, where he appeared on “Face the Nation” and discussed his opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal suggesting a secret vote of confidence on the president by House Democrats. “My first reaction after the debate was surprise that suddenly the country was aghast,” he said, sipping a coffee and wearing a blue suit, white handkerchief and sneakers. “I didn’t see anything in that debate I hadn’t seen at least in parts the last couple years.” ... His decision to challenge Mr. Biden had its roots in the president’s visits to Capitol Hill in 2021 to push for his domestic program. What Mr. Phillips saw was what much of the country would see three years later in the disastrous debate that doomed Mr. Biden’s campaign: an aging politician who had trouble articulating his own agenda. “It was an unmitigated disaster, and it was the first jarring moment for most of us in the caucus,” Mr. Phillips recalled. By 2023, he came to believe that Mr. Biden could not overcome his decline and beat former President Donald J. Trump. So, brash as it seemed, Mr. Phillips took it upon himself to recruit another Democrat to run against the president. His calls to Govs. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois went unreturned. No one else seemed willing to jump into the race. So he decided to run, not necessarily expecting to win but because, he said, it might raise the question. “The issue is he’s going to lose,” Mr. Phillips recalled. “So why would we knowingly follow him over the edge? It wasn’t an argument of him or policy. It was just that simple notion of winning.” It was a futile quest. The party had already decided to stick with Mr. Biden, whatever concerns some had, and Mr. Phillips found himself “deplatformed,” taken off the ballot in some states, rarely invited on television to make his case. “I was well aware of the consequences of my mission,” he said. “I knew the party would not support me. What I was naïve about was how well prepared and effective that machine is to disenfranchise.” He collected 24,000 votes in the New Hampshire primary in January, compared with 79,000 write-in votes for Mr. Biden, who was not even on the ballot. By March, Mr. Phillips’s largely self-funded campaign was over, and he dropped out, a little more scarred, a little more jaded and $4 million poorer. Mr. Biden graciously called to wish him well and invite him to meet. “I would have done the same thing if I were you,” Mr. Phillips recalled the president telling him. Mr. Biden then called each of Mr. Phillips’s adult daughters to say nice things about their father, although the promised invitation never materialized. “It’s been the saddest part of this entire drama to see a man of great integrity and competency and almost heroic political engagement put in this position,” Mr. Phillips said on Sunday. “It’s sad.” He added: “I want to see him regaled as an American hero, not an American tragedy. So it’s really hard.” Mr. Phillips left the interview to drive out to Virginia, where he has a farm, and addressed about 100 young people brought from around the country by the National History Academy. Someone interrupted, and a woman came to the front of the auditorium to read the letter just posted online by Mr. Biden announcing he was bowing out. There were “five seconds of just stone-cold silence,” Mr. Phillips recalled. He said he felt conflicted, satisfied that what he saw as the party’s No. 1 problem had been solved even as he regretted the way it happened — and that it happened so late. He made clear he had no intention of seeking the nomination now, reasoning that Democratic primary voters had a chance to pick him if they had wanted to, and they did not. So now Mr. Phillips looks ahead to the final six months of his term. He is not running for re-election to his House seat and does not know what might be his path. He said he wanted to work on fixing the system, attacking gerrymandering and other structural issues that promote dysfunction over collaboration. He has heard from many Democrats expressing regret for not taking him more seriously before or gratitude that he spoke out. That obviously has been gratifying. But, he said, “Real vindication and gratification will come with victory in November.”
