Ten days after President Biden’s disastrous debate against Donald Trump, Washington congressman Adam Smith called on Biden to drop his reelection campaign. The ranking Democrat on the powerful Armed Services Committee, Smith was one of the most senior members of his party to take that leap. “The idea that we are going to slow-walk into fascism because we don’t want to hurt somebody that we respect’s feelings — I cannot even begin to tell you how angry that makes me,” he said at the time. Since then, efforts to get Biden off the ticket have waxed and waned, but Biden’s critics, who include Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, now have momentum. I spoke with Smith on Thursday night about what he thinks will happen next, why he doesn’t favor a “mini-convention,” and how Democrats got into this jam in the first place.

Suddenly, the push to get Biden out of the race has gained a lot of momentum. This looks like a coordinated effort among party leaders, including even Barack Obama. Do you think it ends with Biden dropping out? Are you more confident on that point than you were a couple of days ago?
Yes, more so than I was a couple of days ago, to be sure. And I think there is a coordinated effort that’s happening. I know some of the details, but I don’t know all of them. It seems to be where this is headed, but it’s not 100 percent there yet, is my take.

Is Hakeem Jeffries taking the temperature of members, or has the rank and file not been so involved in this?
I think the rank and file has been pretty involved. Nancy Pelosi has played a huge role as well because relationships are so key at this point. She has them more so than Hakeem does, but Hakeem has been involved as well.

It seemed like a big turning point came when Pelosi went on Morning Joe about a week ago and made those cagey comments about Biden. Did that give people a permission slip to speak out?
I think it helped. But to that point, I had been having a lot of private conversations with a lot of people, and I’d been worried that all this private stuff wasn’t getting us anywhere because part of the message from the Biden campaign team that was determined to keep him in at any cost was “If this was such a big problem, how come nobody’s saying anything publicly?”

The timelines are so hard to keep track of, but there had been a shift like three, four days ago in my conversations. I had been talking to people and it was “Oh gosh,........

© Daily Intelligencer