"Worst idea since Sarah Palin": Democrat Dean Phillips' Biden challenge could "blow up in his face"
Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., is launching a bid for the Oval Office Friday, a longshot move that some of his colleagues deemed a vanity project and other top Democrats privately describe as a mid-life crisis, Politico reports. His new candidacy, though not likely to present much of a genuine challenge to incumbent President Joe Biden, also represents the undercurrent of discontent with the current president among Democratic voters.
In private conversations, the millionaire businessman has emphasized that voters need an alternative to the 80-year-old president. A half-dozen sources who have spoken directly to Phillips told Politico that while he has described feeling a sort of obligation to Biden, he has also voiced concern about the president's ability to defeat former President Donald Trump in the upcoming presidential election. The Minnesota Democrat is "seeing a problem that everyone sees, but no one is talking about," one of the sources told the outlet, describing Phillips as "frustrated" by it all.
"He was really earnest in his presentation of it. He framed it as this revelation he had when he was in Vietnam, visiting the site of his father’s death,” another source who spoke to Phillips said, referring to the trip the congressman took last spring to the site where his father was killed during the Vietnam War. “But I don’t think he understands the institutional forces that he is going to be up against and how — even if a lot of Democrats privately share some of his fears — no one is going to line up behind him.”
At first, Phillips told the sources that he wanted to publicly recruit another candidate, calling in August for a "moderate governor" to step up to the plate. "I thought there was a way for him to raise this concern, identify if there was space for another candidate, get someone else in, and then gracefully bow out and resume being a member of Congress,” a third source who spoke to Phillips directly told Politico.
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