Biden campaign officials have been making their disappointment in the former Obama staffers calling on the president to drop out of the 2024 race well known. And now the “pod bros” themselves are firing back.
On Friday’s new episode of “Pod Save America,” co-hosts Jon Favreau and Dan Pfeiffer, who previously served as former President Barack Obama’s chief speechwriter and communications director, respectively, took several minutes to respond to the criticism they have received for speaking openly and honestly to their listeners about the risks of keeping President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee.
About halfway through the hour-long episode, the 41-year-old Favreau brought up both Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough’s suggestion that Biden is “deeply resentful of his treatment under the Obama staff” and a passage from The New York Times that characterized Biden’s advisers as dismissing the “Pod Save America bros” as “operatives who worked for a cerebral, cool-guy president and never understood the world according to the scrappy kid from Scranton.”
“Care to respond, my fellow elitist pod bro?” Favreau asked Pfeiffer, 48, speaking from his home in the Bay Area in front of a wall of framed Obama paraphernalia.
“I have tried to maintain a very even temper through this process,” Pfeiffer prefaced his response, explaining how “personally uncomfortable” he has felt about speaking out against Biden and his inner circle. “But that New York Times piece just pissed me off to no end,” he said, “because the idea that we are doing this, that we are raising questions about whether Joe Biden can win, purely out of personal animus is so fucking infuriating.”
Then, after laying out how much he “loves” Biden personally, the fellow Delaware native, added, “The idea that this is somehow some personal attack on Joe Biden because he didn’t go to an Ivy League school or I don’t understand Scranton or we don’t understand Scranton is just so infuriating. It’s infuriating personally, but it’s more infuriating because it explains why they have fucked up the response to this debate so bad.”
As he put it, none of this is about Joe Biden the man, it’s about beating Donald Trump. As a political operative, Pfeiffer said, “The incompetence of spending your time fighting ‘Pod Save America,’ David Axelrod, George Clooney, and the most popular figure in the Democratic Party [Obama] at a time when you were struggling with Black voters is fucking insane!”
Favreau, who appeared even more fired up than usual as he sat behind his microphone wearing a trim gray t-shirt at Crooked Media’s L.A. headquarters, echoed that sentiment when he said the Biden team has “bigger fucking fish to fry,” asking, “What are you spending time on us for? Go fucking just beat Donald Trump or help your candidate be on message!“
“Also, if he was the scrappy kid from Scranton, I’d be fucking thrilled!” Favreau added. “I love that Joe Biden. The Joe Biden I don’t love is talking about fucking NATO all the time!”
He even went so far as to compare Biden to Trump, saying, “The idea that they’re doing this fucking Trump grievance bullshit—everyone’s counting Joe Biden out—it’s just so silly and it’s so counterproductive.”
“They’re so focused on remaining the nominee that they’ve lost the thread, that the goal here is to be re-elected president,” Pfeiffer said, before acknowledging that if he were on Biden’s team he would “hate us” too.
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