It was June 27 of last year, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez had to turn off the TV in her Capitol Hill apartment after just 20 minutes.
That was the night Joe Biden was stumbling over his words in the presidential debate that would doom his reelection bid. “It just was too painful,” Gluesenkamp Perez, a 37-year-old auto repair and machine shop owner turned Democratic congresswoman from Washington state, told me in a recent interview.
During the Democratic Party’s freak-out that followed Biden’s disastrous debate, Gluesenkamp Perez was one of the first in its ranks to call on Biden to drop out. She not only doubted “the president’s judgment about his own health [and] his fitness to do the job,” but also questioned whether “unelected advisers” were quietly pulling the strings at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
“We didn’t see him unscripted much, which was a problem,” the congresswoman said when we spoke. Her blunt assessment of how White House aides handled it: “We got our leg pissed on, and they were trying to tell us it was raining.” (She has not read Original Sin, the best-selling book about the cover-up of Biden’s mental decline published in May.)
“I believe I have an obligation to ensure that our country is being run by elected representatives and not their staff.” —Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez
We all know what happened next. Gluesenkamp Perez’s party spiraled out of control while Biden and his team desperately tried to cling on. Then came Kamala Harris’s coronation and Trump’s big win in November.
Now, with Democrats struggling to raise money from donors and registering their lowest approval rating in 35 years, most of Gluesenkamp Perez’s colleagues would rather talk about anything other than the Biden cover-up—and the wider problem of the gerontocracy that runs the party and Washington. Earlier this month, The New York Times reported that the party’s autopsy of the 2024 election is expected to avoid grappling with the questions about whether Biden should have run for reelection at all.
