Veteran Democrat strategist Patti Solis Doyle slammed her party as “leaderless” and “agendaless” with former President Joe Biden “off the radar completely,” blasting the White House for trying to cover up his obvious mental decline.
Solis Doyle, who served as Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign manager, told journalist Mark Halperin how happy she is to have taken a step away from the “middle of politics” due to “what’s going on in the party” during a recent podcast interview:
“I have never been happier not to be actually in it — in the middle of politics — than I am right now, because it sounds really depressing, what’s going on at the party,” she said, emphasizing how Democrats are “getting attacked from all sides” for losing the White House back to President Donald Trump.
She continued, “The other problem that they have is that there’s no real leader. If your party holds the White House, the leader of the party is the president. If your party doesn’t hold the White House, the leader of the party is the last president of that party.”
“So right now, for us, that’s Joe Biden. But he has completely — he’s off the radar completely … So right now, we’re leaderless, we’re messageless, we’re agendaless,” Solis Doyle, who is also an alumni of Biden’s and former President Barack Obama’s campaigns, explained. “We don’t have any alternative ideas to the president’s and the Republicans’ right now. So I’m concerned to say the least.”
Hitting back at those who remain in denial about how badly former Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democrats lost in 2024, the political operative emphasized how much of a “massacre” it was for her party:
“There are people who say, ‘Oh it wasn’t a landslide.’ It absolutely was… Democrats lost ground in every single county in America,” she told Halperin.
“I think it’s very very difficult to look at what happened [in] November 2024 and not think it [was] just a massacre to Democrats,” she continued, before citing Biden’s worsening mental aptitude.
“The ‘Original Sin’ was sort of running an 80-plus-year-old man who was not, you know, as ‘with it’ as they were telling us… and then asking us to not believe our lying eyes… He probably was not capable of serving another four years.”
While acknowledging that former Vice President Kamala Harris did an “exceptional” job on her 2024 campaign “given the circumstances,” Solis Doyle said there is little talk of Harris running again in 2028, because “When you lose an election…you’re like, incompetent.”
“It’s just the way the cookie crumbles,” she said:
She added that Harris’s loss was partially due to her failure to “distance herself from Joe Biden as much as she should have.”
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