Jen O’Malley Dillon, President-elect Joe Biden’s campaign manager and incoming White House deputy chief of staff, walked back comments she made in a recent interview suggesting that congressional Republicans were “a bunch of f---ers.”
The mea culpa came in a virtual conversation Thursday with veteran Democratic operatives Stephanie Cutter and Teddy Goff, during which O’Malley Dillon acknowledged she “used some words that I probably could have chosen better” when speaking with author Glennon Doyle for a Glamour magazine interview published Tuesday.
In that interview, O’Malley Dillon recalled the blowback Biden faced from fellow Democrats throughout the party’s 2020 nominating contest for invoking a bygone era of Washington bipartisanship which many progressives viewed as unrealistic and outdated.
“In the primary, people would mock him, like, ‘You think you can work with Republicans?’” O’Malley Dillon told Glamour. “I’m not saying they’re not a bunch of f---ers. Mitch McConnell is terrible. But this sense that you couldn’t wish for that, you couldn’t wish for this bipartisan ideal? He rejected that.”
Addressing the controversy Thursday, O’Malley Dillon argued that “the point that I was really making” in the Glamour interview “is an incredibly important point. And that really is about the president-elect and why he was supported by over 81 million people, and what they were looking for.” She went on to restate Biden’s “belief that we can get things done, and we can get them done if we come together.”
O’Malley Dillon’s crass remarks generated fierce condemnation this week from Republican officials and conservative media figures, who claimed it undercut Biden’s appeals to national unity. But the backlash to the Glamour interview also in turn provoked its own fury from Democrats and some pundits, who accused O’Malley Dillon’s critics of faux outrage — especially those who had remained largely silent for years of President Donald Trump’s incendiary and often off-color rhetoric.
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