By In baseball, a closer is typically brought into the game during the final inning or two to make sure that the team can hold the lead. They throw hard and intimidate the opposing team, slamming the door on any potential comeback.
For the Democrats who aim to dump Joe Biden from the ticket, their manager just walked to the mound and signaled for the closer to come in and finish off the sitting president.
Enter Barack Obama.
According to a report by The Washington Post, the former president has joined Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in telling Joe Biden that his campaign for reelection is now over, telling allies that he thinks the president’s path to victory has “greatly diminished.”
Obama has spoken with Biden only once since the debate, and he has been clear in his conversations with others that the future of Biden’s candidacy is a decision for the president to make. He has emphasized that his concern is protecting Biden and his legacy, and has pushed back against the idea that he alone can influence Biden’s decision-making process.
Behind the scenes, Obama has been deeply engaged in conversations about the future of Biden’s campaign, taking calls from many anxious Democrats, including former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and has shared his views about the president’s challenges, according to people with knowledge of the calls, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Obama sees his role as a sounding board and counselor to his former vice president, telling allies that he feels protective of Biden. In these conversations, Obama has said he thinks Biden has been a great president and wants to protect his accomplishments, which could be in jeopardy if Republicans control the White House and both chambers of Congress next year.
In some conversations, Obama, who has long looked to data for political insights, has told people he is concerned that the polls are moving away from Biden, that former president Donald Trump’s electoral path is expanding and that donors are abandoning the president.
For these Democrats, Biden has never been able to recover from losing his debate against Donald Trump. Despite his defiant pledges that he will stay in the race and calling his performance “one bad night,” those closest to the president think the chances of him remaining in are thin.
“We’re close to the end,” a person formerly allied with Biden, sounding like he was talking about someone in hospice care, told NBC News.
The outlet writes that their source, “who previously doubted Biden would ever step aside, acknowledged that it’s still the president’s decision but joined in the array of Biden allies who say he is nearing a point of no return.
As the extraordinary events have unfolded, the president tested positive with Covid on Wednesday and retreated to his vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, taking him off the campaign trail. Once again, it offered a sharp contrast with former President Donald Trump, who, even after his brush with death on Saturday, will appear at a raucous coronation at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Thursday night.
In the hours after the assassination attempt on Trump last weekend, some Democrats said — even feared — that the calls for Biden to step aside would be “frozen” as the president dealt with a national crisis. But that faded quickly. Some allies now say that the shooting, which has caused an even more intense rallying around Trump within his party, only makes it more glaringly obvious that the nagging narrative of whether Biden is on a cognitive decline cannot win the White House.
A sense of reality is beginning to wash over some of the president’s top campaign lieutenants, who have endured streams of phone calls from donors and one-time supporters flagging that they can no longer back Biden.”
During a recent interview, Biden said that he would only leave the race if a doctor told him he had to for health reasons. Yesterday, the president was diagnosed with COVID-19, but his medical staff has described his symptoms as though he were discussing a cold.
A source close to Biden pushed back against the effort to oust the sitting president.
“Can we all just remember for a minute that these same people who are trying to push Joe Biden out are the same people who literally gave us all Donald Trump? In 2015, Obama, Pelosi, Schumer pushed Biden aside in favor of Hillary; they were wrong then and they are wrong now,” the source told NBC News later this afternoon.
The source pointed to polling in the 2016 election that showed Hillary Clinton leading by as much as nine points.
“How did all this work out for everyone in 2016? Perhaps we should learn a few lessons from 2016; one of them is polls are BS, just ask Sec. Clinton. And two, maybe, just maybe, Joe Biden is more in touch with actual Americans than Obama-Pelosi-Schumer?” the source continued.
NBC News noted, “This is unusually blunt language representing the views of the people closest to Biden, who are increasingly frustrated with the lack of loyalty from party leaders. It shows that the scars of 2015, when Biden did feel pushed aside by Obama in favor of Hillary Clinton, are still showing.”
He has a point. Recent polling has shown that Biden does better than all of his proposed replacements, except for one.
[Read More: Four Potential Replacements For Joe Biden]
