For Dean Phillips, the modern Cassandra of American politics, this I-told-you-so moment brings no joy. A little vindication, yes. Sadness, too, and sympathy for a man who gave his life to public service and deserved a better finale.
But when it comes down to it, Mr. Phillips did tell everyone so, even though no one listened. He said early and often that President Biden was too old to run again, that he could not win, that the Democrats should find someone else to lead them into the election. When no one else picked up the mantle, he tried himself, only to be alternately ignored or pilloried.
So when Mr. Biden stunned the world by pulling out of the race on Sunday, it was a bittersweet moment. Mr. Phillips could tell himself that he had tried to warn the party and at least some people remembered. By the end of the day, his phone had blown up with 1,276 text messages. He could not help wondering what would have happened had Mr. Biden made this decision 18 months ago. “Vindication,” he said, “has never felt so unfulfilling.”
The story of Dean Phillips certainly looks different today than it did even a month ago. Until the world saw a frail and fumbling president on the debate stage on June 27, Mr. Phillips was a little-known third-term congressman from Minnesota whose long-shot challenge of Mr. Biden in the Democratic primaries had been dismissed as a quixotic exercise. Now it looks a little more prophetic.
The point, he said, was to raise the alarm, not to advance his own ambitions. “My mission was to be a Paul Revere, not a George Washington,” he said. “I think that’s been accomplished.”
Mr. Phillips sat down at a Washington hotel on Sunday to discuss his journey just 90 minutes before Mr. Biden announced that he was pulling out. The congressman had just come from the studio of CBS News, where he appeared on “Face the Nation” and discussed his opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal suggesting a secret vote of confidence on the president by House Democrats.
“My first reaction after the debate was surprise that the country was so aghast,” he said, sipping a coffee and wearing a blue suit, white handkerchief and sneakers. “I didn’t see anything in that debate I hadn’t seen the last couple years.”
Mild-mannered and friendly with sweptback brown hair, an easy smile and a multimillion-dollar fortune at his disposal, Mr. Phillips, 55, may have been an unlikely rebel to take on a president with whom he voted 100 percent of the time. In his official biography, he describes himself as an “eternal optimist,” though after the experience of the past year he confesses to a little naïveté.
He never knew his father, who was killed in Vietnam without meeting his son. When his mother remarried, young Dean took the last name of his new stepfather, Edward Phillips, the chief executive of Phillips Distilling Company, known for producing the first American-made brand of schnapps. He also found himself in a family where his adoptive grandmother, Pauline Phillips, was the writer behind the famous Dear Abby advice column.
After earning an undergraduate degree from Brown University and a master’s in business administration from the University of Minnesota, Mr. Phillips joined the family business and later helped build Talenti Gelato into a top ice cream brand. Estimated to be worth $124 million, he beat a five-term House incumbent in 2018 representing a Minnesota district that included the Mall of America and had gone Republican for nearly six decades. He hewed to the political center, joining the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus as well as the House Democratic leadership.
His decision to challenge Mr. Biden had its roots in the president’s visits to Capitol Hill in 2021 to push for his domestic program. What Mr. Phillips saw was what much of the country would see three years later in the disastrous debate that doomed Mr. Biden’s campaign: an aging politician who had trouble articulating his own agenda.
“It was an unmitigated disaster, and it was the first jarring moment for most of us in the caucus,” Mr. Phillips recalled.
By 2023, he came to believe that Mr. Biden could not overcome his decline and beat former President Donald J. Trump. So, brash as it seemed, Mr. Phillips took it upon himself to recruit another Democrat to run against the president.
His calls to Govs. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois went unreturned. No one else seemed willing to jump into the race. So he decided to run, not necessarily expecting to win but because, he said, it might raise the question. “The issue is he’s going to lose,” Mr. Phillips recalled. “So why would we knowingly follow him over the edge? It wasn’t a question of him or his policy. It was a simple issue of winning.”
It was a futile quest. The party had already decided to stick with Mr. Biden, whatever concerns some had, and Mr. Phillips found himself shut out, taken off the ballot in some states, rarely invited on television to make his case. “I was well aware of the consequences,” he said. “I knew the party could not support me. What I was naïve about was how effective the machine would be to deplatform me.”
He collected 24,000 votes in the New Hampshire primary in January, compared with 79,000 write-in votes for Mr. Biden, who was not even on the ballot. By March, Mr. Phillips’s largely self-funded campaign was over, and he dropped out, a little more scarred, a little more jaded and $4 million poorer.
Mr. Biden graciously called to wish him well and invite him to meet. “I would have done the same thing if I were you,” Mr. Phillips recalled the president telling him. Mr. Biden then called each of Mr. Phillips’s adult daughters to say nice things about their father, although the promised invitation never materialized.
“It’s been the saddest part of the whole thing to see a man of great integrity and competency and almost heroic political engagement put in this position,” Mr. Phillips said on Sunday. “It’s sad.” He added: “I want to see him regaled as an American hero, not an American tragedy. So it’s really hard.”
Mr. Phillips left the interview to drive out to Virginia, where he has a farm, and addressed about 100 young people brought from around the country by the National History Academy. Someone interrupted, and a woman came to the front of the auditorium to read the letter just posted online by Mr. Biden announcing he was bowing out. There were “five seconds of just stone-cold silence,” Mr. Phillips recalled.
He said he felt conflicted, satisfied that what he saw as the party’s No. 1 problem had been solved even as he regretted the way it happened — and that it happened so late. He made clear he had no intention of seeking the nomination now, reasoning that Democratic primary voters had a chance to pick him if they had wanted to, and they did not.
So now Mr. Phillips looks ahead to the final six months of his term. He is not running for re-election to his House seat and does not know what might be his path. He said he wanted to work on fixing the system, attacking gerrymandering and other structural issues that promote dysfunction over collaboration.
He has heard from many Democrats expressing regret for not taking him more seriously before or gratitude that he spoke out. That obviously has been gratifying. But, he said, “Real vindication and gratification will come with victory in November.”
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