The Democratic Party is finally saying the quiet part out loud: “Biden should not have run again.”
Revelations about President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and his administration’s alleged cover-up have returned to the national conversation ahead of next week’s release of CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios political correspondent Alex Thompson’s book, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.”
Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., a 2024 presidential campaign surrogate for President Joe Biden, and considered a potential 2028 presidential candidate, acknowledged on Wednesday that Biden should not have run for a second term.
And Beto O’Rourke, one of Biden’s 2020 Democratic primary competitors and the former congressman from Texas, joined the criticism this week, accusing Biden’s re-election campaign of failing future generations of Americans.
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Former presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke (left) and potential 2028 presidential candidate Rep. Ro Khanna said President Joe Biden should not have run for re-election in 2024. (Getty Images)
When pressed by Martha MacCallum on “The Story” on Wednesday about campaigning for Biden in 2024, Khanna said he hadn’t had the full picture of Biden’s health and mental acuity ahead of his disastrous debate performance, but he admitted, “We should be honest as a party that we made a mistake.”
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“I do think it’s important that, given what has come out, that we take accountability,” Khanna said. “Obviously, he should not have run,” Khanna said.
Responding to a series of interview clips from early 2024, when Khanna affirmed Biden’s intention to run for re-election and described the president as “fully coherent,” Khanna said he had been telling the truth.
“Of course, I didn’t have the full picture,” Khanna added.
Khanna was a campaign surrogate for Biden in 2024 before he dropped out of the race. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
O’Rourke took Khanna’s call for Democratic accountability a step further on “Pod Save America” this week, calling Biden’s decision to run for re-election in 2024 a “terrible mistake.”
“Just to be clear: Biden should not have run again. And to be even more clear: He failed this country in the most important job that he had,” O’Rourke said.
“In fact, the entire rationale for his presidency the first time, and the rationale he tried to sell us on for his attempt to run for re-election, ‘Only I can stop Donald Trump.’ And he failed to do that, and it’s not just you and me, but our kids and grandkids and the generations that follow that might have to pay the price for this. We might very well lose the greatest country that this world has ever known,” O’Rourke said.
Former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke speaks to attendees during a “Our Fight, Our Future” rally at The Millennium bowling alley on October 2, 2024, in Austin, Texas (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
An excerpt from Tapper and Thompson’s book released by Axios this week revealed that Biden’s declining health was “so severe that there were internal discussions about putting the president in a wheelchair, but they couldn’t do so until after the election.”
In hindsight, Khanna and O’Rourke agreed that Democrats should have had an opportunity to launch their own presidential bids. And now that President Donald Trump has returned to the White House, and an already crowded field of potential 2028 Democratic candidates are mulling presidential campaigns, they said it’s important to take accountability for 2024.
“Obviously, there should have been an open primary. And, I don’t think that’s very difficult that Democrats should just be straight up that he should not have run, now that we have all the facts. There should have been an open primary. I think to move on and move forward, it’s important to take accountability and be straightforward with the American people,” Khanna said.
O’Rourke said America’s future could be in the balance “in part because of the decision that Biden, and those around him, made to run for re-election instead of having an open primary where the greatest talent that the Democratic Party can muster could be on that stage to have a competition of ideas, and track-record and vision and really excite, not just Democrats, but the people of this country who did want change. I mean, if anything was clear coming out of 2024, they wanted change.”
Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., was a campaign surrogate for President Joe Biden in 2024. (Getty Images)
The once-2020 Democratic presidential candidate, who is 52 years-old, said the Democrat’s Biden failure creates a credibility problem.
“I think that credibility problem is going to persist up until when Democrats say, ‘We f—ed up, and we made a terrible mistake,'” O’Rourke said.
Despite O’Rourke’s comments this week, he said in an email to supporters through his voting rights organization, Powered by People, last February that, “Donald Trump is the single greatest threat to our democracy. Our best chance to defeat him is to support Joe Biden in this election.”
“Amy and I voted for him in the Texas primary . . . and are looking forward to voting for him again in November,” he added. “This president has done an extraordinary job of improving our economy, confronting the climate crisis, reducing childhood poverty and fending off the very worst of Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s mounting attacks on our most fundamental freedoms.”
Former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan defended his former boss this week, while acknowledging that Biden’s disastrous debate performance was shocking. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Another young Democrat and Biden’s former National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, continued to defend his former boss at Politico’s Security Summit on Thursday, dismissing an allegation that Biden had forgotten his name, and defending his leadership as commander-in-chief.
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“What happened in that debate was a shock to me,” Sullivan admitted. “I think it was a shock to everybody.”
A Biden spokesperson did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
Fox News Digital’s Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report.
