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As a top adviser to Joe Biden for more than four decades, former White House chief of staff Ron Klain has earned the reputation for being a “Biden whisperer.” And in the aftermath of the president’s disastrous June 27 debate, Klain was one of the people telling Biden to ride out the political maelstrom and stay in the presidential race. He was also one of Biden’s staunchest defenders over that time, going so far as to publicly criticize those in the Democratic Party who had turned on the president. After Biden dropped out and endorsed Kamala Harris, Klain attacked the “donors and electeds” who “pushed out” Biden. In the latest episode of On With Kara Swisher, Klain tells Swisher he’s still irritated about all that — and was surprised by Biden’s choice — but he also thinks it was a good, “courageous” decision. Below, an excerpt of their conversation.
On With Kara Swisher
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Kara Swisher: So let’s talk about how we got here. I’d love you to reflect on [Biden] stepping down, from a legacy point of view and also in the immediate. How are you feeling about this? We’ll get to your support of him because you were quite adamant on Twitter. In fact, I texted you, “Wow, Ron, you were pretty sharp about him.” Talk a little bit about what’s happened and how you feel about it first.
Ron Klain: Well, look — I think the president made a decision that he couldn’t keep the party unified and that he wasn’t just going to walk off the field and say, “Well, you guys sort it out.” He was going to point the direction forward, and that direction, he pointed very clearly toward Vice-President Harris. And so I think that was a sound, a wise decision, and I think he’s executed it extremely well.
You see the vice-president emerging in very short order as the consensus nominee of our party with strong backing, a lot of enthusiasm. I think that’s great. Look, I believe, as he said last night [in his Oval Office address about dropping out], he earned a second term based on his record and the vision he laid out in Michigan recently for what his 100-day agenda would be as president. So I was disappointed that people in the party called for him to leave the race, and I thought they got out of control. I thought it was unfortunate, nasty, and public — and shouldn’t have been.
And as I said to several — people who didn’t hesitate to call the White House, when they were a couple of points behind in their races, asking for help to win, we never said, “Hey, you’re behind. You should drop out. Get someone new in there.” I thought they were doing him a disservice, but I think he handled it incredibly graciously and came up with a plan that is going to work for us in 2024 of handing the baton very explicitly to the vice-president and throwing his campaign organization, his campaign resources, behind her. And I think we’re headed in the right direction now. So I don’t really love how we got here, but I think we’re in a good place. We’re going to move forward. We’re going to win this year.
Swisher: I want to stick with how we got here, first, because obviously the debate is what caused it. There were always questions about whether he was able to do four more years. Age was always an issue — for both candidates, let me say. But it seemed to resonate more with him, with the public and with media, also. Let’s talk about that as it was leading into it. Had you been worried about that before, the age issue, or is it something you didn’t think would cause this to happen?
Klain: Well, look — I’m a worrier. I worry about every debate. I’ve been on the winning side of debates, losing side of debates. It’s no fun to lose. And President Obama had a very bad debate in 2012, and I thought overall — I thought the debate was an opportunity for the president to put some of these questions to rest but obviously did not go well that night, and that is what it is. And so we took a gamble, and the gamble didn’t work.
Swisher: Right.
Klain: But I thought it was a reasonable chance to take. I thought the president, as he showed in the days after the debate, was fully capable of making his case forcefully on the stump, fully capable of answering unscripted questions, as he did at his press conference. I thought we would see that on debate night, and we just didn’t, of course.
Swisher: So one of the — let me tell you: I think this is unfair. You oversaw the preparation for the debate.
Klain: Yes, indeed.
Swisher: Some people don’t know. And I feel like you got thrown under the bus a little bit, honestly, and the reports … Ultimately, it’s the candidate’s fault, in that case, but you may not blame him. But to me, that’s the case. There were reports the family blamed you. John Morgan, a Biden donor, said he was overcoached, overpracticed. Jim Clyburn, representative, blamed it on preparation overload. What do you think happened there, from your perspective?
Klain: Look, I didn’t feel thrown under the bus. The president was very kind afterward and took responsibility in our conversations about it and said he’d had a bad night and told me not to feel bad about it. I think that, um, you know, I think he — he just was off. I think Trump is always a challenge to debate because he spews out so much craziness that you have to figure out which piece of craziness you respond to, which ones you’re going to let go. And I think the president also believed that the public would see Trump and realize how ridiculous it was and that a lot of it was kind of self-executing, and it just wasn’t. And so I think that, look — I’ll take my share of responsibilities. I’ve always been — we win debates; I’m happy to get credit for our wins. I assume — I’m happy to share responsibility for our defeats. But I just think he was off that night and wasn’t very good that night. And that’s what he said. And it just is the way it worked out, unfortunately.
Swisher: So at the same time, it brought up this idea of whether he was in good health or not.
Klain: Yeah.
Swisher: Whether he was in good mental health. Obviously, top advisers got blamed for this, the preparation itself, and also not being transparent that he wasn’t able to campaign effectively. How do you answer those critics?
Klain: Well, look — what I say is look at what he did after the debate. I thought his speech in North Carolina the next morning was powerful and effective. He did an interview with George Stephanopoulos I thought was very good. He did a foreign-policy press conference I thought was superb — a tour de force about foreign policy. He then went to Michigan and laid out an agenda for the first 100 days of a second term that I thought was a powerful agenda — got a great response at the NAACP convention.
And so I think the proof that he could campaign was that he did campaign — and campaigned very effectively. The idea that somehow people weren’t transparent about the state of his health or the state of his acuity, I think, is belied by the fact that the president did events all the time. And I understand there wasn’t a lot of viewership, but he went into the Roosevelt Room a couple times a week, would make a policy announcement, would take questions from the press corps.
And, yes, as he said the next day in North Carolina, he does speak a little more slowly now, he doesn’t debate quite as well now, and definitely he is older. But he is sharp as a tack. He’s able to govern, he’s able to lead, and I think he was able to campaign. And I just think that, uh, you know, there was just an overreaction to the debate, not so much among the voters but among the elite class in politics, and that a couple of weeks of that started to hurt him in the polls.
Swisher: Okay.
Klain: And then people started to panic about the polls. And then I just think it was just a sad chain reaction of events.
Swisher: Even if he was still sharp as a tack, his ability to communicate looked, at least, that it had diminished over the past four years. Were you ever concerned about it? Were you surprised by how it rolled through that this was a concern? And it was a concern for voters; it wasn’t just the Washington elite. There was poll after poll concerned about age — period. Did you not see it coming, that idea, or were you surprised? Because I was looking upon the way you were reacting. You were sort of like “Why are you all doing this?” kind of thing.
Klain: Yeah, look, I think —
Swisher: In your public tweeting — and it was quite public. You’ve been quite public about it.
Klain: I’ve been very public about this. Look, I wasn’t surprised by the fact that there were questions about it. I thought the president then went out and answered those questions. So people said, “Well, look — we want to see that he can —” The day after the debate, it was “We want to see that he can do an interview. We want to see that he can do a press conference. We want to see that he can campaign.” And he did an interview and he did a press conference and he campaigned, and they all went well.
And so what I was surprised by was people kept saying, “Here’s the bar.” And he’d jump over the bar and they’d go, “Well, how about this bar? Well, how about that bar?” And then, in the end, the argument just became “Well, look — he’s behind in the polls, and he can’t win.” And I thought that was wrong. Not that he wasn’t behind but that he couldn’t win.
And we had people who hadn’t been in presidential campaigns telling me that: “Well, he’s three points behind. He can’t possibly win.” I thought that was very unfair. But look — I just think it was fair that people asked questions after that debate. I think it was fair that people said, “Here’s the bar,” but I thought he cleared the bar. That was what was frustrating about that period.
Swisher: When he decided to drop out — because he was quite adamant before, and I get that, that he would do that until the end. Right? What was your initial reaction? I suspect you were talking to him. Is that correct? Or not?
Klain: Yes. I was surprised by his decision, but I respect it.
Swisher: Why surprised?
Klain: Surprised because I thought he was going to continue to fight on. If you live in the Biden world, the Biden campaign, we’ve been down before. He got crushed in Iowa in 2020 and crushed even worse in New Hampshire, and we came back and won decisively. And then throughout 2021, we were told that we would never get our agenda done. We couldn’t get a pass. We were screwups. We blew this. We blew the thing with Manchin; we blew that; we blew this. And we got it all passed. And then in the fall of 2022, we were told we were going to lead the party to a wipeout in the 2022 elections. And, in fact, we produced the best midterm result that any Democratic president had produced since FDR. And so I just thought we would do it again. And so I was surprised when he made the choice he made.
Swisher: You advised him not to, correct? To stick with it.
Klain: I had, yes, but he reflected on it and I think felt that the party was just too divided about his candidacy and that he had a very clear path forward. The path forward was to explicitly endorse the vice-president.
Swisher: Right, which he did.
Klain: And to throw all his resources and support behind her and quickly get to party unity around her and help her win. And I think it’s a very smart path, and it’s going to be an effective path.
Swisher: You tweeted at donors, about four separate occasions, which, again, is funny to watch. Each time it was a variation on a theme: The big-money donors trying to oust the president.
The final tweet, which came after the president dropped out, said, “Now that the donors and electeds have pushed out the only candidate who has ever beaten Trump, it’s time to end the political fantasy games and unite behind the only veteran of a national campaign, the outstanding Vice President Kamala Harris. Let’s get real and win in November.” Talk a little bit about that, because the Republicans are trying to say — it was “a coup,” they used, etc., etc. You’re saying that donors and electeds pushed out the president. Talk about the idea of bringing her in and pushing back on the Republican narrative, since you want to do that, correct? That it’s not a coup; it’s a political decision here.
Klain: Yes. It’s definitely not a coup.
Swisher: Yeah.
Klain: I think that the president was definitely pushed. There’s no question about it, but it was his decision, ultimately, and the decision he made to unite the party and to point the party to her. And I think that was a good decision, a courageous decision, a historic decision. And I think we all ought to unite behind that decision now and let bygones be bygones and move forward.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
On With Kara Swisher is produced by Nayeema Raza, Blakeney Schick, Cristian Castro Rossel, and Megan Burney, with mixing by Fernando Arruda, engineering by Christopher Shurtleff, and theme music by Trackademics. New episodes will drop every Monday and Thursday. Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
