Ex-Obama official tells Biden to 'stay hidden' since he 'doesn't inspire confidence'
CNN commentator and ex-Obama official Van Jones advised President Biden on Tuesday to hide from the public, just like he did in the 2020 campaign, because he is not a good public communicator.
"If I were Biden, I would stay hidden," Jones said. "I will tell you why. He doesn’t inspire confidence. He is not a great messenger for himself."
Jones then criticized the president's campaign, arguing that while Biden has "done a tremendous job for this economy," he should be letting other people speak on his behalf.
"Union members, union leaders are racking up win after win," he said. "They should be put forward. There are clean energy executives in red states that are putting people to work."
"There’s something wrong with this campaign where we are somehow expecting Joe Biden — frankly, he hid during the last campaign — to just somehow come out and be Flash Gordon and save his own campaign," Jones continued. "The people who are benefiting from the Biden economy — and they exist — should be empowered to speak."
Jones briefly served as a special adviser to President Obama on green jobs before resigning in 2009.
Former Obama official David Axelrod also weighed in on Biden's campaign during the panel discussion on CNN, predicting that his possible rematch with former President Trump will be "trench warfare."
"They will spend more time talking about Donald Trump than Joe Biden, and he will be spending a lot of time talking about Joe Biden," Axelrod said.
Axelrod has also repeatedly called out the Biden campaign in public, deflecting critics who say that his advice is unwarranted.
In early January, Axelrod said he cared more about Biden beating Trump than about whether he is liked within pro-Biden circles.
"I’m at a stage in my life where I don’t really give a s--t," Axelrod said in an interview with Politico. "I’m 68. You know, everybody in Washington sort of thinks that the most important thing is that the president likes you and that you get invited to parties and s--t like that. I’ve been to plenty of parties. I worked in the White House. That’s not the thing."
Biden's supporters in the media and in the Democratic Party have expressed concerns about his low popularity ahead of November, with the president's approval rating plummeting to the lowest on record for a U.S. president in the last 15 years, according to a new poll by ABC News.
Biden's approval rating sits at just 31%, according to a national survey produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates, with fieldwork by Ipsos Public Affairs via its online, probability-based KnowledgePanel. The poll found 58% of respondents disapprove of the job Biden is doing as president. That makes his approval rating worse than even former President Trump’s lowest in office, which was 36%, according to ABC News. It also marks the lowest since former President George W. Bush's administration in the mid-2000s.
