Latest news with #Plouffe
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Can Democrats blame their problems all on Biden?
Party leaders who long tiptoed around Joe Biden's health and questions around senility now seem to be settling on a new tack in explaining the 2024 loss to Donald Trump: It's all Biden's fault. At least that was the chief reason put forward by Kamala Harris' campaign manager, David Plouffe, in explaining what led to the November to the forthcoming book "Original Sin," which NBC News obtained on Tuesday, Plouffe called the efforts to defeat Trump on a truncated timeline a 'f---ing nightmare' 'And it's all Biden. He totally f---ed us,' Plouffe told the book's authors, according to the excerpt. 'We got so screwed by Biden as a party.' Plouffe did not respond to a request for comment. A Biden spokesperson said they had not reviewed every part of the book and would not comment on specific revelations. 'We continue to await anything that shows where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or where national security was threatened or where he was unable to do his job. In fact, the evidence points to the opposite — he was a very effective president,' the spokesperson said. Plouffe's comments in the book followed those from a series of Democrats — from former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on down — who have placed much of the blame for the 2024 loss to Trump on Biden, his decision to run for a second term and his subsequent late exit from the race. But that thinking is opening a new tension in the party, where some on the left say that to just blame Biden is papering over a more substantive issue of failures by the campaign and the party, and that leaders should share blame and reflect. Not doing so, they warn, may lead to further losses in the next presidential election and even possibly the midterms next year. In response to Plouffe's remarks in the book, longtime Democratic National Committee Finance Chair Chris Korge delivered his own stern words in an interview with NBC News. 'To blame Biden now is to shift the accountability from the people who lost the race: the consultants, the so-called gurus,' Korge said. Korge said Democrats are better served if they looked forward but noted that they still needed to review what went wrong. He said the party had a 'perfect convention, including a huge contingency of influencers and podcasts.' Harris also, he added, had a tremendous debate, and they raised a record amount of money — more than $1.4 billion. 'We had all the money we needed and we found a way to not use our money wisely,' Korge said of the campaign. 'I find it rich that consultants who lost that election are now trying to blame Joe Biden.' Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, went further in saying that Harris was a flawed candidate and that Plouffe was attempting to 'whitewash' a bad campaign. 'All the things being said about Biden — he should have dropped out earlier, and there's likely a cover-up — is probably true,' Green said. 'But that's too easy an excuse to distract Democrats from solving a very real problem, which is that the party is seen as clubby political insiders who are defending a broken economic system when we need anti-establishment candidates who stand for political and economic change.' The discussion around Biden is accelerating as a series of deeply reported books examining the Democrats' 2024 loss have been released. 'Original Sin,' by CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios' Alex Thompson, to be publicly released later this month, purports to lay out aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment. 'Fight,' a book by Jonathan Allen of NBC News and Amy Parnes of The Hill, gives anecdotes of Biden not recognizing high-profile party leaders and of the former first lady and others in his inner circle cocooning the then-president to obscure infirmities from the public. The new revelations seemed to prompt an offensive by Biden, who went on ABC's "The View" last week to declare he was not in cognitive decline in office. Biden also hired Chris Meagher, a former White House aide, to handle his communications. Meagher did not respond to a request for comment, but last week he criticized one of the books on X: 'Yes, Biden was old, but that's a lot different than an allegation of mental decline that kept him from being able to do the job, which there is no evidence of." Biden had long rebuffed attempts to stop him from seeking a second term, though he had implied that his presidency would serve as a bridge to a new generation of Democrats. When he announced his intention to seek re-election, he picked up support from party leaders and some White House officials who then moved to his campaign. Once Biden had a cataclysmic debate performance against Trump in late June of last year, the tide turned for him to leave the race. Biden stepped aside and backed Harris, but by then there was just 107 days for her to mount a campaign against Trump. 'In a 107-day race, it is very difficult to do all the things you would normally do in a year and a half, two years,' Jen O'Malley Dillon said on "Pod Save America" last November. Left unasked, however, was what role O'Malley Dillon — and others who were on Biden's White House team before moving to the campaign — played in helping create the very predicament they were complaining about. That included not putting Harris out in front early enough in the administration so she would be prepared to lead if necessary, as well as how much those running Biden's White House and then campaign efforts pushed for answers on his mental health. Many Democrats today express some regret over how the process turned out. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who made a bid for the White House in 2020, also recently said that the party could be in a different place today if it had held a real primary. 'You know, everything we look at in a rearview mirror after you lose an election. Yes, we would have been better served by a primary. But we are where we are,' Klobuchar told NBC News' 'Meet the Press' on Sunday. Simon Rosenberg, a longtime Democratic strategist, said the party would be well served to evaluate its mistakes but also quickly adjust to the new political landscape before them. 'There are a lot of lessons to be learned from 2024 beyond just whether Biden should have run, and it's important that we continue to have a spirited conversation inside the family about what went wrong and what we can learn from it,' Rosenberg said. 'But the real next chapter for us is going to be the 20 or 30 political leaders in our party charting a new course, having a big debate, and we're having a big debate and charting a new course for our party over the next few years.' Rosenberg added that the playing field is quickly changing with Trump in the White House. 'That's where the real action is going to be, because Trump has already created a whole new dynamic, and the politics that generated 2024 are no longer with us,' Rosenberg said. 'We now have a new set of realities that we have to respond to and build from, and so what's going to be more important.' This article was originally published on
Global News
14-05-2025
- Sport
- Global News
Senior golfer scores double hole-in-1 in a single round
An 89-year-old Winnipeg golfer is proving that age is no reason to slow down. Hank Plouffe, who will be turning 90 in July, hits up Bel Acres Golf & Country Club, just north of Winnipeg, five days a week, from Monday to Friday. 'It's the enjoyment of the friendship of the people that you play with,' Plouffe said. 'It's a game; there's fun to it.' And it was friendship that drew Plouffe, who averages about 70 games a season, to the game of golf 57 years ago. 'I had a very good friend who was a very good golfer, and he passed away on the golf course in Pinawa,' Plouffe said. 'He was my best friend and he started me into golfing, and from then on, it kept on going.' Story continues below advertisement View image in full screen Frank Plouffe has been golfing for 57 years. Michael Draven / Global News Despite decades on the course, Plouffe is still experiencing firsts. In his lifetime, he's got eight holes in one. The two most recent ones were shot just the other weekend at the Netley Creek Golf Course. Get daily National news Get the day's top news, political, economic, and current affairs headlines, delivered to your inbox once a day. Sign up for daily National newsletter Sign Up By providing your email address, you have read and agree to Global News' Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy 'I hit the ball and I didn't look up, and he says, 'Gosh, that looks like it's going in the hole.' I said, 'Yeah right,'' said Plouffe, who was golfing with family at the time. 'I took a club and I was looking around the edge of the green for the ball and they all stood around the hole and said, 'It's in the hole! We told you that!'' Then came the unthinkable — a second hole-in-one in the same round. 'We get up to number 12, and it's a short hole, and I took my nine iron out and I hit the ball and this time I looked up, and sure enough, it hit the green and curved right into the hole,' he said Story continues below advertisement 'And I said, 'I can't believe this is happening'. Two holes in run in one round … It's unbelievable.' The odds of it happening are about 67 million to one. 'Well, I wasn't that surprised, he's a good golfer,' said Brian Kaluznick, who has been golfing with Plouffe at Bel Acres for about 40 years. 'It's an amazing feat… and especially for a guy that's only 89 years old.' View image in full screen Plouffe hits up Bel Acres Golf & Country Club about five times a week. Michael Draven / Global News But Plouffe credits it to a stroke of luck. 'Usually attention like this is for heroes,' Plouffe laughed. 'I'm not a hero, I'm just an everyday golfer.' But some things — like Plouffe's mindset and staying active — can't be credited to luck. Story continues below advertisement 'Everybody is going to have a bad shot, everybody is going to have a decent shot. Just remember the good ones,' he said. 'The bad ones, well, put up with them and forget it. (Just) keep yourself active, that's great.'
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Biden ‘totally f***ed' Kamala's chances of winning the Presidency by waiting too long to drop out, top campaign aide says
A top campaign aide during former Vice President Kamala Harris's failed 2024 presidential run has placed the blame for her loss solely at the feet of President Joe Biden, according to a new book. David Plouffe, who was drafted into Harris's campaign after Biden stepped away from the race last summer, didn't parse words, saying the then-president "totally f***ed us" by not dropping out of the race sooner. Before working with Harris, Plouffe managed former President Barack Obama's winning 2008 campaign and served as a senior adviser in his White House. He gave his unfiltered opinions in Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, a new book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. Plouffe is quoted as calling Harris's 107-day campaign "a f***ing nightmare," which he said was "all Biden." In the book, Plouffe says he received calls from several donors worried about what they saw as Biden's declining health and cognitive skills, and his ability to deliver speeches. He said he pushed the White House and the Democratic Party on whether or not they really felt hitching their electoral hopes to Biden again in 2024 was the best course of action. In addition to Plouffe, authors Tapper and Thompson spoke to approximately 200 people, including members of Congress, the White House, and campaign insiders about the campaign. Plouffe wasn't the only one sounding the alarm about Biden, according to their reporting. A senior aide, who quit the White House because they did not believe Biden should be running, told the authors that "we attempted to shield him from his own staff so many people didn't realize the extent of the decline beginning in 2023." The staffer said that they "love Joe Biden," but also felt that it was " a disservice to the country and to the party for his family and advisers to allow him to run again.' Another prominent Democratic strategist accused Biden of "stealing" a 2024 victory from the American public. 'It was an abomination. He stole an election from the Democratic party; he stole it from the American people," the strategist reportedly said. The book also reveals that Biden's aides had discussed his potential use of a wheelchair if he were re-elected. 'Biden's physical deterioration — most apparent in his halting walk — had become so severe that there were internal discussions about putting the president in a wheelchair, but they couldn't do so until after the election,' Tapper and Thompson write. Aides at the time believed that putting Biden in a chair during the election would hurt his chances of beating Donald Trump. But Biden's doctor, Kevin O'Connor, reportedly 'privately said that if [Biden] had another bad fall, a wheelchair might be necessary for what could be a difficult recovery.' The book further claims that Biden did not recognize actor George Clooney — who eventually called for the president to step away from the race, despite his admiration for him — during a 2024 fundraiser. While questions of Biden's apparent decline were circulating behind closed doors in the White House and Democratic movers and shakers, the public focus on his cognitive abilities came to a head following his disastrous debate performance against Trump in June of 2024. According to the book, Senator Chuck Schumer confronted Biden after the debate at his home in Rehoboth, Delaware, and tried to convince him to step aside to preserve his legacy. He reportedly warned that if he continued and lost to Trump, half a century of "amazing, beautiful work goes out the window." "But it's worse than that – you will go down in American history as one of the darkest figures," Schumer reportedly said. Biden reportedly replied to Schumer by telling him he had "bigger balls than anyone I've ever met." The former president did eventually heed the calls to step aside, but many of the book's subjects argue it was too late to salvage an effective campaign.
NBC News
13-05-2025
- Politics
- NBC News
Can Democrats blame all their problems all on Biden?
Party leaders who long tiptoed around Joe Biden's health and questions around his senility now seem to be settling on a new tack in explaining the 2024 loss to Donald Trump: It's all Biden's fault. At least that was the chief reason put forward by Kamala Harris' campaign manager David Plouffe in explaining what led to the November loss. According to the forthcoming book "Original Sin," which obtained by NBC News on Tuesday, Plouffe called the efforts to defeat Trump on a truncated timeline a 'f---ing nightmare' 'And it's all Biden. He totally f---ed us,' Plouffe told the book's authors, according to the excerpt. 'We got so screwed by Biden as a party.' Plouffe did not respond to a request for comment. A Biden spokesperson said they had not reviewed every part of the book and would not comment on specific revelations. 'We continue to await anything that shows where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or where national security was threatened or where he was unable to do his job. In fact, the evidence points to the opposite — he was a very effective president,' the spokesperson said. Plouffe's comments in the book followed those from a series of Democrats — from former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on down — who have pointed to Biden, his decision to run for a second term and his subsequent late exit from the race, as much of the blame for 2024 loss to Trump. But that thinking is opening a new tension in the party, where some on the left say that to just blame Biden is papering over a more substantive issue of failures by the campaign and the party, and that leaders should share blame and reflect. Not doing so, they warn, may lead to further losses in the next presidential election and even possibly the midterms. In response to Plouffe's remarks in the book, longtime Democratic National Committee Finance Chair Chris Korge delivered his own stern words in an interview with NBC News. 'To blame Biden now is to shift the accountability from the people who lost the race: the consultants, the so-called 'gurus,'' Korge said. Korge said Democrats are better served if they looked forward but noted that they still needed to review what went wrong. He said the party had a 'perfect convention, including a huge contingency of influencers and podcasts.' Harris also, he added, had a tremendous debate, and they raised a record amount of money — more than $1.4 billion. 'We had all the money we needed and we found a way to not use our money wisely,' Korge said of the campaign. 'I find it rich that consultants who lost that election are now trying to blame Joe Biden.' Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, went further in saying that Harris was a flawed candidate and Plouffe's remarks attempted to 'whitewash' a bad campaign. 'All the things being said about Biden — he should have dropped out earlier, and there's likely a cover up — is probably true,' Green said. 'But that's too easy an excuse to distract Democrats from solving a very real problem, which is that the party is seen as clubby political insiders who are defending a broken economic system when we need anti-establishment candidates who stand for political and economic change.' The discussion around Biden is accelerating as a series of deeply reported books examining the Democrats' 2024 loss have been released. 'Original Sin, ' by CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios' Alex Thompson, to be publicly released later this month, purports to lay out aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment. 'Fight,' a book by Jonathan Allen of NBC News and Amy Parnes of The Hill, gives anecdotes of Biden not recognizing high-profile party leaders and of the former first lady and others in his inner circle cocooning the then-president to obscure infirmities from the public. The new revelations seemed to prompt an offensive by Biden, who went on ABC's "The View" last week to declare he was not in cognitive decline in office. Biden also hired Chris Meagher, a former White House aide, to handle his communications. Meagher did not respond to a request for comment, but last week on X, he criticized one of the books saying, writing on X: 'Yes, Biden was old, but that's a lot different than an allegation of mental decline that kept him from being able to do the job, which there is no evidence of." Biden had long rebuffed attempts to stop him from seeking a second term, though he had implied his presidency would serve as a bridge for Democrats to a new generation. He then announced a second term, and he picked up support from party leaders and some White House officials who then moved to his campaign. Once Biden had a cataclysmic debate performance against Trump in late June of last year, the tide turned for him to leave the race. Biden stepped aside and backed Harris, but by then there was just 107 days for her to mount a campaign against Trump. 'In a 107-day race, it is very difficult to do all the things you would normally do in a year and a half, two years,' Jen O'Malley Dillon said on "Pod Save America" last November. Left unasked, however, was what role O'Malley Dillon — and others who were on Biden's White House team before moving to campaign efforts — played in helping create the very predicament they were complaining about. That included not putting Harris out in front early enough in the administration so she would be prepared to lead if necessary, as well as how much those running Biden's White House then campaign efforts pushed for answers on his mental health. Many Democrats today express some regret over how the process turned out. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who made a bid for the White House in 2020, also recently said that the party could be in a different place today if it had held a real primary. 'You know, everything we look at in a rearview mirror after you lose an election. Yes, we would have been served better by a primary. But we are where we are,' Klobuchar told NBC News' 'Meet the Press' on Sunday. Simon Rosenberg, a longtime Democratic strategist, said the party would be well served to evaluate its mistakes but also quickly adjust to the new political landscape before them. 'There are a lot of lessons to be learned from 2024 beyond just whether Biden should have run, and it's important that we continue to have a spirited conversation inside the family about what went wrong and what we can learn from it,' Rosenberg said. 'But the real next chapter for us is going to be the 20 or 30 political leaders in our party charting a new course, having a big debate, and we're having a big debate and charting a new course for our party over the next few years.' Rosenberg added that the playing field is quickly changing with Trump in the White House. 'That's where the real action is going to be, because Trump has already created a whole new dynamic, and the politics that generated 2024 are no longer with us,' Rosenberg said. 'We now have a new set of realities that we have to respond to and build from and so what's going to be more important.'
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Biden made Harris campaign a 'nightmare,' destroyed her chances by staying in 2024 race too long, aides charge
Former President Joe Biden's second campaign ruined former Vice President Kamala Harris' chances of defeating President Donald Trump in the 2024 election, according to a top Democratic consultant. David Plouffe, former President Barack Obama's campaign manager in 2008 and a senior advisor on Harris' 2024 campaign, detailed how dire Biden's run was for the Democrats in a new book, "Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again." "And it's all Biden," Plouffe said in the book, authored by CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios' Alex Thompson, about Biden's choice to stay in the race so long and how the White House assured him Biden was capable of winning another election. "He totally f---ed us." As a result, Plouffe said that Harris' brief campaign against Trump turned into "a f---ing nightmare," pointing the blame on Biden. Critics Pile On Biden Following Abc Interview, Blast His Refusal To Commit To Cognitive Test: 'Disqualifying' Read On The Fox News App Plouffe is far from the only one who believes that Biden undercut his own party running again in 2024 as his faculties began to decline. A senior White House aide described in the book that "we attempted to shield him from his own staff so many people didn't realize the extent of the decline beginning in 2023." The aide, who ultimately departed the White House because they did not believe Biden should run in 2024, described Biden's decision to run for a second term as a "disservice" to the country and Democrats. "I love Joe Biden. When it comes to decency, there are few in politics like him," the aide said in the book, which is slated for release Tuesday. "Still, it was a disservice to the country and to the party for his family and advisers to allow him to run again." Spokespeople for Biden and Harris did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital. "Original Sin" details the 2024 election cycle and how Biden's team orchestrated a cover-up to hide just how severely his mental faculties had suffered. The book is one of several that detail Biden's decision to run in 2024 and assert the dramatic decline of his cognitive function. Biden Aides 'Scripted' Everything, Allowed His Faculties To 'Atrophy,' New Book Claims For example, the book, "Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History," also detailed how the White House kept Biden from socializing even with those he regarded as friends and allies. However, that book, authored by Chris Whipple, a former producer for CBS' "60 Minutes," said that one White House aide suggested "walling Biden off from the world was a grave mistake." "'They were afraid he might say the wrong thing or might feed the mental acuity narrative,' he told me. 'And so he started seeing fewer and fewer people. They allowed his faculties to atrophy. But I think, like knives, they have to be sharpened. They get sharpened by rubbing them up against steel. And they don't get sharpened by sitting in a drawer,'" Whipple article source: Biden made Harris campaign a 'nightmare,' destroyed her chances by staying in 2024 race too long, aides charge
