Free Republic

President Biden hesitated to drop his re-election campaign in part because he and his senior advisers worried that Vice President Kamala Harris wasn't up to taking on Donald Trump, according to three Biden aides familiar with recent talks about his plans. Why it matters: Biden, 81, ultimately decided to withdraw under pressure from the party and endorsed Harris, but his private anxieties reflect broader questions among some Democratic leaders about Harris as their nominee this November. Driving the news: This next week will be critical for Harris, 59, to prove doubters wrong as she moves quickly to try to clear...

President Biden's campaign chair convened an all-staff call Friday and urged staffers to tune out news coverage that has focused on whether Biden will be pushed aside as the Democratic nominee, according to a recording of the call obtained by Axios. "Don't watch cable news all the time," chair Jen O'Malley Dillon told staff at the campaign and the Democratic National Committee. "That is not the real world. The real world is the voters that are standing with us, the delegates that are with us, and we're going to weather this because of this organization." "I talked to him...

When White House aides appear on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," they're often booked between 7 and 7:40 a.m. ET. That's so they'll reach one crucial and loyal viewer: President Biden. Why it matters: Biden's years-long love of MSNBC's staple morning show affects how the White House runs — and who Biden listens to. ,p> Zoom in: The president often calls co-host Joe Scarborough — a former Republican congressman who's now a harsh critic of Donald Trump — to get Scarborough's take on issues and sometimes vent about media coverage, according to people familiar with the relationship. ,p> During the day,...

Pete Buttigieg has long been a man in a hurry. Since 2010, he has run for treasurer of Indiana, mayor of South Bend, chair of the Democratic National Committee, and president of the United States. At 39, he is one of the most omnipresent and newly-powerful members of President Joe Biden’s Cabinet. But he says he’s not thinking about what comes next, even as he’s buzzed about as a potential Biden heir.

...As Vice President Kamala Harris grapples with a portfolio of seemingly intractable issues and responsibilities that have drawn her away from the national spotlight — she Zoomed into the infrastructure Cabinet meeting from Paris on Friday — other Democrats have raised their own national profiles.... ...Though the expectation remains that Biden will mount a reelection bid, Democratic operatives are preparing for the possibility that it won’t materialize... Biden has also said he wants to be a bridge to the next generation, which has fed routine speculation that he could bow out to make way for a younger Democratic candidate. Typically,...

So much for Southern hospitality. This fall, Tennessee will say goodbye to retiring Sen. Lamar Alexander, one of the last of the genteel Republican moderates in the chamber. And the race to replace him has turned into perhaps the ugliest Republican primary in the country — with spurious super PAC attacks, Mitt Romney being invoked as a slur and President Donald Trump lining up on opposite sides as Sen. Ted Cruz.

On the eve of the Nevada caucuses in February, Bernie Sanders and his supporters were feeling invincible. “I've got news for the Democratic establishment,” he declared on Twitter on Feb. 21, the day before he went on to a landslide win in the Nevada caucuses. “They can't stop us.” Since then, not only did the “establishment” stop Sanders - it stamped out the candidacies of a string of left-wing insurgents, leaving the progressive movement reeling and in a state of despair. Three highly-touted liberal House candidates - Jessica Cisneros in Texas, Robert Emmons in Illinois, and Morgan Harper in Ohio...

**SNIP** The suggestion of illegal behavior and the specter of putting a political opponent behind bars sounded familiar to some senior campaign aides to Hillary Clinton, who believe Trump and his allies are running a version of their “Crooked Hillary” playbook from 2016. “Last time, he had the right-wing conspiracy media to boost his chants of ‘lock her up,’ but this time he's going to actually weaponize the federal government against our nominee,” said Jesse Ferguson, a senior spokesperson on the Clinton campaign. The attacks on Biden pivot off the lucrative business activities of his son Hunter during the Obama...