{"id":626389,"date":"2024-07-03T01:23:55","date_gmt":"2024-07-02T22:23:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/ari-emanuels-aspen-assault-on-joe-biden-and-the-dems\/"},"modified":"2024-07-03T01:23:55","modified_gmt":"2024-07-02T22:23:55","slug":"ari-emanuels-aspen-assault-on-joe-biden-and-the-dems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/ari-emanuels-aspen-assault-on-joe-biden-and-the-dems\/","title":{"rendered":"#Ari Emanuel\u2019s Aspen Assault on Joe Biden and the Dems"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\n Ari Emanuel insists he\u2019s a kinder and gentler man these days, but in the wake of June 27\u2019s presidential debate, the hard-driving agency head is still fighting mad at Joe Biden and his top aides.<\/p>\n

\n App<\/a>earing before a packed house at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado, the Endeavor CEO had been invited to talk with the festival\u2019s acting curator Tina Brown about his Hollywood career.\u00a0But with Biden\u2019s frail performance dominating the headlines, Brown made a quick detour. \u201cDemocrats are jumping out of the window,\u201d she began after Emanuel took his seat.\u00a0 \u201cWhat are you thinking?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n \u201cWell, I\u2019m pissed off at the founding fathers,\u201d said Emanuel. \u201cThey had the start date of 35-years-old, they just didn\u2019t give us the end date. And, well, everybody died [back then], so they didn\u2019t have to give the end date.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n Emanuel blamed Biden\u2019s advisors for being less than candid about his physical stamina and mental acuity and blasted the president for reneging on a campaign pledge to step aside after a single term. \u201cHe said he was going to run for one term, and he\u2019s doing it to restore democracy. He then runs for a second term \u2014 that\u2019s the first bit of malarkey, as he would say.\u00a0He and his cohorts have told us that he\u2019s [been] healthy for over a year,\u201d Emanuel continued.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n \u201cI had a father who died at 92, but at 81 I took away his car, and it was a very simple test for me,\u201d he said to loud applause. \u201cIf you were driving from downtown Beverly Hills to Malibu, would you want Biden to do it at night? Would you want Trump to do it at night? If the answer is neither, you cannot have them running a $27 trillion company called the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n Asked for his impressions of Trump, Emanuel responded more carefully.\u00a0\u201cHe is who he is. I don\u2019t know if he\u2019s slowed down. I have no idea. You know, he looked okay [while he was up] there,\u201d adding ominously, \u201cHe will do what he says [in a second term].\u00a0That\u2019s what he does. That\u2019s what we should be expecting.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n He suggested that the two candidates had something in common. \u201cDonald Trump said, \u2018I\u2019m the only one.\u2019 Right? \u2018I alone can make all these problems go away.\u2019 And now Biden is saying \u2018I\u2019m the only one that can beat Trump.\u2019 Seems like it\u2019s pretty similar here, [but] we have a great bench in the Democratic Party. We\u2019re looking at a man who\u2019s saying the other guy\u2019s a liar, and he\u2019s telling us malarkey!\u201d<\/p>\n

\n Emanuel, a prolific Democratic donor, said the late-in-the-game<\/a> concerns about Biden\u2019s viability left the party with little room to maneuver. \u201cBrokered convention, no. Now there\u2019s some question whether the delegates can do something \u2026 so lawyers have to look at this \u2026 The lifeblood to a campaign is money, and maybe the only way this gets [solved] is if the money starts drying up,\u201d said Emanuel, whose brother Rahm, a one-time chief of staff to President Obama, currently serves as the administration\u2019s ambassador to Ireland. <\/p>\n

\n \u201cYou\u2019ll see in the next couple weeks, if the money comes in \u2026\u00a0I talked to a bunch of big donors, and they\u2019re moving all their money to Congress and the Senate.\u00a0It\u2019s a legal issue now,\u201d he sighed, a situation that he said left Democrats with few tenable options. \u201cMaybe there\u2019s some wiggle room, but I haven\u2019t seen it. I don\u2019t know, I\u2019m not a lawyer, but we\u2019re in fuck city!\u201d<\/p>\n

\n The Aspen Ideas Festival, which is celebrating its 20th\u00a0year this Summer, is usually a tranquil event that brings out powerbrokers from politics, media<\/a> and the arts for panels and debates about current events. This year Peter Thiel, Michael Eisner, Sam Altman, David Petraeus and a swarm of former and sitting Senators, including John Kerry and Kay Bailey Hutchinson were on hand to discuss topics from the environment to the war in Gaza. But in the first days after the debate, the only topic on everyone\u2019s mind was Joe Biden. At parties and panels across the Aspen Institute\u2019s immaculately-manicured campus, the fate of the president and the alarming prospect of a Trump victory was a constant refrain among the Festival\u2019s progressive-leaning patrons.<\/p>\n

\n Emanuel had even harsher words for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he\u2019d skewered in a fiery address at the Simon Wiesenthal Center last month.\u00a0\u201cI think he\u2019s a narcissist,\u201d Emanuel replied, when asked what had prompted his well-publicized broadside against Bibi. \u201cI think for the last 20 years, Netanyahu has only done one thing and that\u2019s stay in power. His bunch of Cabinet members are causing huge problems. And the ultra-orthodox and the right wing in Israel are causing problems in the West Bank. The [Palestinians] should have a homeland. Look, my grandparents had the first pharmacy in Israel. I remember going after the Six Day War \u2026 So my commitment to Israel is known. Netanyahu has done one thing and one thing only \u2014 stayed in power, and he doesn\u2019t deserve it. He doesn\u2019t deserve my family\u2019s legacy and the legacy of people in Israel.\u00a0The Palestinians have deserved better in the West Bank. And it\u2019s for us as Jews that we want to give them homeland \u2014 for our survival. We\u2019re not giving them anything \u2026 And we have to stop with all these selfish leaders across the globe that think that they need to hold on for the rest of their lives, because they alone can do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n At a luncheon following Emanuel\u2019s appearance, a politically connected studio executive told The Hollywood Reporter<\/em> that a few of his alarmed associates had called Jeffrey Katzenberg, the co-chair of the Biden campaign, seeking comfort or clarification. Katzenberg, who spent the weekend squiring the president to the Hamptons, apparently offered neither. \u201cI think Jeffrey was as surprised by this as everyone else,\u201d said the loose-lipped exec.\u00a0\u201cHe knows the optics aren\u2019t great, but he says the fundamentals are still solid; everyone just needs to hold the line. But Jeffrey\u2019s from Hollywood, right? He knows that optics are everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n Later that day, another Hollywood heavyweight, active in national politics, confided over cocktails that some of his well-funded colleagues were mounting an intense lobbying effort to convince another Democrat to enter the race. \u201cThey\u2019re calling News<\/a>om and Whitmer and Jeff Shapiro,\u201c he said. \u201cBasically, anyone with a pulse and a base.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n Despite the doomcasting from some Hollywood Democrats, not everyone in Aspen was ready to write Biden off.\u00a0Pollster Celinda Lake, a veteran of Democratic campaigns, counseled patience, noting that debates general<\/a>ly have negligible impact on presidential elections. Conservative lawyer George Conway, the MAGA-loathing ex-husband of Trump\u2019s top aides, said the panic was premature. \u201cThere\u2019s still a lots of time to correct this.\u201d he said.\u00a0\u201cFour months is an eternity in politics.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n California Representative Katie Porter sounded a similar note. \u201cI\u2019m not sure what everyone is so shocked about,\u201d she said. \u201cNobody said he was a great debater. But when you look at what he has achieved in his first term, on all sorts of progressive priorities, I think it\u2019s safe to say Biden is the best president we have had in 50 years, and you don\u2019t want to dump someone like that so casually.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n For his part, after he was finished warning about the danger to American democracy, Emanuel couldn\u2019t resist a parting shot\u00a0at a fellow Aspen attendee: Open AI CEO Altman. \u201cI think he\u2019s a conman,\u201d he said in reply to a question about the controversial AI tycoon.\u00a0\u201cElon gave him a lot of money \u2014 it was supposed to be a non-profit, now he\u2019s making a lot of money. I don\u2019t know why I would trust him. I don\u2019t know why we would trust these people. (According to public filings, Musk contributed\u00a0more than $44 million into Open AI between 2016 and 2020).<\/p>\n

\n \u201cElon said to me once \u2014 this scared me \u2014 he said; \u201cYou know Ari, your relationship with your dogs?\u2026 Think about it the following way. You\u2019re the dog to the AI,\u201d Emanuel told the rapt audience. \u201cI don\u2019t want to be a dog.\u201d (Altman declined to comment.)<\/p>\n

\n Despite his combative posture, Emanuel insists he\u2019s become less intense over the past few years \u2014 a gentler man than the\u00a0Entourage<\/em>\u00a0character he famously inspired. \u201cThere was a period of time I ran the agency with a lot of anger, a lot of fear, a lot of pressure,\u201d he recalled. \u201cThen I did a lot of work on myself, and there was a transition period where we had a lot of businesses \u2026 the fear and anger was not conducive to the size we were at. So I have, I\u2019ve changed. I still keep a lot of pressure. [But] I don\u2019t go crazy on people the way I did, as that [show] satirized. And I kind of realize, you know, that there are other ways to get to the end. It\u2019s worked out. I\u2019m not perfect, because sometimes I do get angry, but it\u2019s so much better. I mean, Mondays were really bad for people, because I would be thinking about things, seeing things, and I would come in and it would just be a volcano, oh, it would be horrible\u2026 It\u2019s just not a way to live your life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n