How Biden's Campaign Confronted Him on Abortion [View all]

[demmiblue]

Joe Biden’s aides knew the 2020 frontrunner was going to get ripped apart over his support of the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding for abortion procedures. They were frustrated that the former vice president wouldn’t change his stance, and that he wasn’t initially receptive to their concerns. Now that Biden has come out against Hyde, his aides are trying to prevent him from being labeled a flip-flopper.

This was a tense two days in Biden’s D.C. headquarters. The candidate was caught off guard after an NBC News story published Wednesday morning attempted to nail down where he stands on abortion policy—specifically Hyde. Symone Sanders, one of Biden’s senior advisers, confronted him, she confirmed to me Thursday night, telling Biden that he was missing how his position disproportionately affected poorer women and women of color without easy access to abortion. Alyssa Milano, the actress who’s become a major online presence on issues of women’s rights as well as a friend of the Biden team, spoke by phone Wednesday to Biden campaign manager Greg Schultz, telling him the candidate needed to change. More calls came in, more tough conversations.

On Wednesday night, his campaign co-chair, Louisiana Representative Cedric Richmond, went on CNN in defense, saying, Biden’s “position on the Hyde Amendment has been consistent." Sort of. Biden supported Hyde until just a few weeks ago, when he seemed to say he was against it when responding to a woman’s question while shaking hands after an event. Then, according to his campaign, he was always for it as a matter of consistency and principle (and supposedly had only said he was against it because he’d misheard the question). When Biden stepped on stage in Atlanta to speak at a Democratic National Committee event last night, he brought a few pages with him to the podium to add to what had already been fed into the Teleprompter. He told the audience he’d been thinking about the Hyde Amendment as he worked on the health-care policy plan for his campaign, adding, “I can’t justify leaving millions of women without access to the care they need and the ability to constitute, exercise their constitutionally protected right.”

That may be true, but everything that Biden attributed to the change was apparent long before he pivoted. The only thing that had changed was that he was now under attack from almost all of his 2020 rivals and other major Democratic players, and from people within his campaign.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/06/biden-abortion-hyde/591241/