Former Vice President Joe Biden is finally opening up a front against Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) with an ad, airing in South Carolina, accusing the Vermont socialist of trying to launch a primary campaign against then-president Barack Obama, who was running for re-election.
“Bernie Sanders was seriously thinking about challenging our first African-American president in a primary,” a narrator in the ad, targeted at South Carolina’s large contingent of African-American voters, says.
“Sanders…can’t be trusted.”
The ad quotes Sanders as saying it would be a “good idea” if “President Obama faced some primary opposition,” and cites an Atlantic story from late last week laying bare Sanders’ plan to take on Obama from the left.
The Atlantic meant to demonstrate the power of former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-VT), who was a key figure in the Nevada caucuses, and was likely behind efforts to stop Sanders’s rise cold in Nevada.
Reid was charged with heading off Sanders’ rise once before — in 2016, when Sanders was giving Hillary Clinton a run for her money in early primary states, winning the popular vote in the Iowa caucuses, and beating Clinton handily in New Hampshire. At the time, Reid called out the powerful, 60,000-member Nevada Culinary Union to send their members to caucus sites to vote for Clinton and bullied casino owners to give Clinton-supporting workers time off with pay to attend caucuses on the Las Vegas Strip.
The result was exactly as Reid anticipated: hundreds of workers turned out for Clinton, leaving Sanders struggling to explain his primary campaign to Democrats who were set on Clinton receiving the nod.
Reid tried again in 2020 to mobilize the Culinary Union for Biden, but it was too little too late, and Sanders won Nevada by a nearly 2-to-1 margin.
But while the Clinton story was common knowledge, Reid’s longtime position as a Sanders foil was not. The Atlantic reported that Reid was tasked to run interference when Sanders began sounding out his Senate colleagues about a potential primary challenge to President Barack Obama in 2012.
“Sanders privately discussed a potential primary challenge to Obama with several people, including Patrick Leahy, his fellow Vermont senator,” the outlet reported. “Leahy, alarmed, warned Jim Messina, Obama’s presidential reelection-campaign manager. Obama’s campaign team was ‘absolutely panicked’ by Leahy’s report, Messina told me, since ‘every president who has gotten a real primary has lost a general [election].'”
Reid reached out: “What could you be thinking? Reid asked Sanders, according to multiple people who remember the conversations. You need to stop.”
Sanders denied the exchange during an interview Monday night, claiming that naysayers could “ask Harry Reid” if they needed proof that Sanders hadn’t tried to challenge Obama.
Here’s the full Sanders answer, in which he goes straight from saying that Harry Reid and Pat Leahy will deny that he was talking seriously about running against Obama in 2011 (they didn’t) into making it about Warren maybe running… in 2016 (Ie, not against Obama) pic.twitter.com/VRNmdLvKdR
— Edward-Isaac Dovere (@IsaacDovere) February 25, 2020
“No, not true at all,” Sanders said. “Call up Harry Reid, he will deny that.”
Reid refused to confirm or deny the Atlantic’s story in interviews last week. He said only that “there was never a serious or established primary challenge to Obama,” likely suggesting that his and Leahy’s efforts to calm Sanders worked.
Sanders then pivoted to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), claiming that he didn’t consider running for president “until 2015,” and did only then because Warren said “she’s not going to run.”
The ad seems to be resonating based on social media reaction, but Biden needs all the help he can get in South Carolina. Now just days away from a primary he was supposed to win handily, Biden is running just four points ahead of Sanders. A debate will take place in South Carolina on Tuesday night.