The COVID-19 pandemic that hit America just as the 2020 presidential election campaign got underway was the “best thing” ever to happen to Joe Biden’s third effort to become president, according to one of his aides.
It’s true that that President Trump had led the nation to unrivaled economic heights, new influence around the world, a restored security and more, and Democrats during the campaign essentially depended on one single issue – the Wuhan virus – to attack him. Individual Democrats even blamed Trump personally for the deaths of the out-of-control worldwide pandemic.
It was Washington powerbroker Anita Dunn who said, “COVID is the best thing that ever happened to him [Biden],” according to a report in the Guardian about a new book, “Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency.”
The book by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes is out soon, and the Guardian obtained an advance copy.
“It was, the authors add, a necessarily private comment that ‘campaign officials believed but would never say in public’ as the U.S. reeled from the impact of the pandemic amid hospitals stretched to breaking and with deaths mounting and the economy falling off a cliff,” the Guardian reported.
The remark by Dunn was made to “an associate,” the report said.
So far, there have been hundreds of millions of COVID-19 cases around the globe, and some 2.5 million deaths, including the 500,000 plus deaths in the U.S.
The report said Allen and Parnes, of NBC News and The Hill, previously collaborated on a book about Hillary Clinton’s second failed White House run, in 2016.
The Guardian’s analysis found, “Dunn’s reported comment points to what became the dominant theme of the election. As the pandemic capsized Trump along with the economy Biden, through a much more cautious approach to campaigning and basic public health concerns, appealed to voters as the right man to manage a recovery.
“Trump sought to hammer Biden for ‘hiding in his basement’ – a reference to Biden’s decision to rarely leave home in Wilmington, Delaware, instead campaigning virtually while the president held rallies and ignored public health guidelines.”
The Washington Examiner pointed out the comment, “at a time when the United States was struggling with rising death tolls, a shattered economy, and a health system close to breaking,” could be “seized on by Biden’s critics that his campaign used the suffering of the public in the opportunistic pursuit of power.”
The report said, “That private thinking reflects what many political analysts said at the time, that the rampant pandemic undermined then-President Donald Trump’s solid economic achievements and standing in national and battleground state opinion polls.”
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This article was originally published by the WND News Center.
