# Fight ![[Assets/c30b84b9ff4174648fa41a905c2b34c0_MD5.jpg]] ## Metadata - Author: [[Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes]] - Full Title: Fight - Category: #books ## Highlights - When he traveled overnight, Biden would have a makeup artist meet him around 8 a.m. in a cleared-out hotel room on his floor to smooth out his wrinkles and cover the liver spots on his face. ([Location 292](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DB8P3PYJ&location=292)) - The people closest to Biden would never cop to the complicity of their own silence. None of them wanted to take the blame for their collective neglect. What many Democratic voters didn’t grasp at the time was that Biden was already on track to lose, and the highest-ranking party insiders were well aware of that. He had won by a comfortable popular-vote majority in 2020—with more than 7 million votes separating him from Trump—which led his supporters to believe he had cruised to victory. But in the only measure that matters, the Electoral College, Biden’s spread in the three pivotal states of Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia amounted, cumulatively, to less than 44,000 votes. ([Location 308](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DB8P3PYJ&location=308)) - “Nobody walks away from this,” Donilon, a senior adviser at the White House, told one prominent Democrat. “No one walks away from the house, the plane, the helicopter.” ([Location 352](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DB8P3PYJ&location=352)) - But after eight years as the second lady and nearly two more as the first lady, the trappings of the most elite levels of Washington power had grown on her. ([Location 357](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DB8P3PYJ&location=357)) - “Ricchetti was one hundred percent in. Donilon was one hundred percent in. All of the people around him. They’re my friends but for a lot of them, this was job security and this was as good a job as they’re ever gonna get,” one Biden ally said. “And let’s be honest, Jill was a thousand percent behind this. So, she was pushing it. The staff was all pushing it. At the end of the day, I don’t think anyone in that inner circle was presenting the president any contrary advice that this thing is not going to be easy or maybe this is not the best thing for the Democratic Party.” ([Location 360](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DB8P3PYJ&location=360)) - they would accept no option other than Vice President Kamala Harris. ([Location 532](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DB8P3PYJ&location=532)) - “Keep fighting,” they told him. The truth was that only one person might have enough sway with Biden to convince him to give up his vision of a second term, and she wasn’t at all interested in doing that. Jill Biden was, if anything, more firm than her husband about maintaining a residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. ([Location 977](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DB8P3PYJ&location=977)) - in San Francisco for the House recess, Pelosi told friends that she believed Biden should step aside. She was too shrewd to put her private thoughts in the public square. If you want a certain path, she thought, don’t announce it. That’s not the way to get someone to go down your path, by making it look like you made it happen. Pelosi had dealt with plenty of powerful men in her time, including countless lawmakers who had to give up their seats under the cloud of scandal or the threat of certain defeat. These men had to be shown their dwindling options, given space to draw their own conclusions, and granted cover to explain their decisions on their own terms. Most important, they must be afforded dignity. Trying to force Biden’s hand would boomerang. He was more stubborn than most, and the call rested entirely with him. For all those reasons, she would never tell him to get out—at least not that directly. ([Location 1128](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DB8P3PYJ&location=1128)) - Pelosi, who had watched Harris’s entire career from a catbird seat in their shared San Francisco Bay area political circles, had about as much confidence in the vice president as Obama had in the president. ([Location 1253](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DB8P3PYJ&location=1253)) - Every time he does anything in public, there’s a risk that he’ll look out-of-it, the ally thought as he watched apprehensively. Why can’t his people see that problem? He needs to get out, and the longer he waits, the harder it will be to have a mini-primary. We’re losing that option. ([Location 1464](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DB8P3PYJ&location=1464)) - Most candidates did that in the planning stages of a run for the presidency. She was thrust into the race because she was next in line when Biden dropped out. And now, more than two months into her candidacy, she had done little to erase the impression that her reason for running was one of circumstance. There was no good explanation for why the backup to an octogenarian president had not mapped out her own narrative as part of a political go-bag. ([Location 3966](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DB8P3PYJ&location=3966)) - McCarthy and his team wanted the full contrast and landed on a catchy turn of phrase that both hit the trans issue and made a larger point about the two candidates: “President Trump is for you; Kamala Harris is for they/them.” It was good, but would the campaign high command sign off on it? ([Location 4049](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DB8P3PYJ&location=4049)) - LaCivita made one tweak, reversing the order of the tag line to read “Kamala Harris is for they/them; President Trump is for you.” ([Location 4059](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DB8P3PYJ&location=4059)) - Most of the decision-makers were not Hillary’s people. They were not Harris’s people. Hell, they were not even really Biden’s people. The campaign was being run by former lieutenants to the president who tried to stop Harris from winning the nomination: Barack Obama. They did not have much use for Bill Clinton. ([Location 4085](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DB8P3PYJ&location=4085)) - By choosing to speak from the Ellipse one week from Election Day, Harris signaled her commitment to the Democratic view that a Trump victory would topple democracy in the U.S. In polls, many Democrats identified that as their top issue. And why wouldn’t they? For about eight years, their party’s leaders had been telling them that the biggest threat faced by the country was Trump destroying the republic. ([Location 4300](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DB8P3PYJ&location=4300)) - Harris campaign officials used the data to talk up “momentum” with fellow Democrats and the media. That narrative got an unexpected boost on Saturday, November 2—three days before polls closed. J. Ann Selzer, the most prominent and respected pollster in Iowa, released a survey showing Harris with a three-point lead, 47 percent to 44 percent, in the Hawkeye State. Iowa wasn’t previously considered competitive. ([Location 4348](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DB8P3PYJ&location=4348)) - His abrasive talk attracted attention. His ideas, which defied partisan orthodoxies, shocked the establishment of both parties. So did his ability to build and maintain a loyal voting bloc. That base stuck with him through four years in the presidency, the Covid-19 pandemic, his 2020 loss, the January 6 impeachment, four indictments, a conviction, a contested 2024 Republican primary, two assassination attempts, and a general election fight against the Democratic tag team of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. ([Location 4431](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DB8P3PYJ&location=4431)) - The best way to manage a hands-on boss was to avoid handing him something to squeeze. ([Location 4521](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DB8P3PYJ&location=4521)) - “You can’t gaslight the American people about Afghanistan, gaslight them about inflation, gaslight them about the president’s decline and think none of that’s going to add up to a political problem,” said one veteran Democratic strategist who worked on past presidential campaigns. ([Location 4629](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DB8P3PYJ&location=4629)) - There was plenty of blame to go around in Democratic circles, but Biden found himself at the center of the Venn diagram. In late July—long before ballots were cast—a former high-ranking government official who is close to both Biden and Obama said the president damned his party by committing “the original sin” of running for a second term. In 2020, Biden asked Americans to look at him as a caretaker, a competent political veteran who would temper the chaos of Trump’s first term and serve as a bridge to the next generation. They elected him, barely, and then he reversed course by seeking reelection. In between, the American public lost faith in his competence, honesty, and cogency—judgments informed by his handling of domestic and foreign affairs, his refusal to level with consumers about inflation, and voters’ own concerns about the effects of aging on his ability to do his job. ([Location 4750](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DB8P3PYJ&location=4750)) - It was all a sad and stunning turn for Biden, who had so endeared himself to his party by defeating Trump in 2020. Back then, he had finally won the prize he had pursued for his entire adult life. He believed he had delivered policies that put him in a league with the nation’s greatest presidents, even as voters told him the opposite. Now, as he prepared to leave the White House, he had lost almost everything: his presidency, his political career, his physical prowess, his acuity, and even some of his friends. What endured was the naked egotism that compelled him to seek a second term, continue to run when it was clear he could not win, and make wild claims that he would have beaten Trump again if only he had not dropped his bid. ([Location 4775](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DB8P3PYJ&location=4775))