Joe Biden Has A Dean Phillips-Rashida Tlaib Problem

Rashida Tlaib and Dean Phillips are not political allies. But in recent weeks the two Democratic lawmakers have emerged together as a pincer-like menace to President Joe Biden’s reelection.

From the far left, Tlaib has denounced Biden in scathing language for his unbending support of Israel and accused him in a video of supporting the “genocide” of Palestinians. A Palestinian American herself, Tlaib is threatening to undermine Biden with Muslim and Arab Americans who make up a crucial bloc in swing states like her own Michigan.

Phillips, from the restless middle, has gone further, launching a challenge to Biden in New Hampshire’s ornamental primary. The Minnesota centrist has called for generational change and argued that Biden cannot be counted on to beat former President Donald Trump. Evoking discontent with the economy, he has promised to “make America affordable again.”

These two Gen X Midwesterners are not coordinating their activities. The convergence of their attacks on Biden is purely coincidental.

Yet in another sense it is hardly happenstance that they are battering Biden in these terms and at this moment. Both represent versions of the Democratic Party’s Trump-era new guard: the radical progressive movement embodied by Tlaib and her fellow members of the Squad, and the anti-partisan, suburban Problem Solvers Caucus set of which Phillips is an outspoken member.

These two factions thrived in parallel when Trump was president, propelling both Phillips and Tlaib to Congress in the 2018 elections. Both lawmakers — and the divergent constituencies they channeled — joined forces with Biden to help topple Donald Trump in 2020.

It should unsettle Biden that they have lost patience with him at the same time.

I first encountered Phillips and Tlaib as candidates during the 2018 campaign, when they beat the odds in different ways to reach Congress. Phillips did so by winning a resounding victory in a historically right-leaning seat, Tlaib by capturing the Democratic nomination as an Arab American leftist in a district long held by mainstream Black Democrats.

Since getting to Washington, they have defied Democratic Party norms, even as they have voted reliably for the party’s agenda.

My colleague Jonathan Martin and I first introduced Phillips as a “Minnesota gelato baron” — he founded the frozen-dessert company Talenti — in an article about the star Democratic congressional recruits aiming to punish Trump’s Republican Party. My first impression of him was of a disarmingly earnest centrist who was determined to engage in politics on his own terms.

Phillips, now 54, was agitating Democratic leaders well before filing to run in New Hampshire. He pushed for Nancy Pelosi to leave as House speaker, forged close relationships with Republicans and pressured Democrats to take up moderate legislation on issues like policing. Ahead of the 2022 election, he called on Biden not to seek a second term.

Phillips has displayed a consistent streak of I-don’t-need-this impatience — a sense that if he can’t do the kinds of things he wants to do in office, he might not stick around long. During a meeting of House Democrats when they were trying to pass the social-spending legislation known as Build Back Better, Phillips declared that he didn’t care if he lost reelection if it meant getting important stuff done.

It is not too hard to see that spirit reflected in his decision to challenge the president.

Tlaib, 47, has been even more vexing for Democrats. She has repeatedly angered party leaders, pro-Israel groups and Jewish colleagues (including Phillips) with her commentary on Israel. When some Democrats argued after the 2020 election that the party had paid a terrible price for tolerating socialist sloganeering and anti-police activism, Tlaib pushed back hard. She accused those critics of effectively urging progressives to give up on fighting for voters of color.

If Phillips has been impatient to the point of self-endangerment, Tlaib has welcomed risks in a come-at-me fashion. She crushed primary challengers in 2020 and 2022. With her broadside against Biden, she may be reckoning that she can dispatch all comers a third time if she has to.

We are likely to find out if she’s right. Even before accusing Biden of complicity in genocide, a pro-Israel PAC was running ads against her in Detroit. Michigan Democrats have trashed her latest comments.

Biden allies and others in the Democratic establishment can recite a rat-a-tat-tat list of reasons why both Phillips and Tlaib should be scorned by the party and minimized by the media.

The barrages are strikingly similar: Both are pilloried as sanctimonious egotists who do not represent the core of the Democratic Party. Both are accused of insensitivity toward powerful Democratic constituencies (Tlaib, for anti-Israel rhetoric that offends Jewish voters; Phillips for bypassing the Black voters of South Carolina by competing in New Hampshire instead.) Both of them, Democrats warn, are missing the most important political point — the need to unite against Trump and thwart his return to the White House.

I wonder who here is actually missing the point.

Biden’s greatest asset in 2020 was his ability to gather up the diverse strands of an anti-Trump coalition in one inoffensive campaign. He won over suburban centrists like Phillips in a way that Sens. Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren could not have done. He earned support from leftists like Tlaib who might never have voted for Michael Bloomberg or Pete Buttigieg.

The president’s fate in 2024 depends on whether he can accomplish the same feat again. Right now, every poll shows that is not happening.

Deriding Tlaib and Phillips as gadflies is easy. Confronting the cracks in the Biden coalition that they represent is much harder.

Democrats roll their eyes at these two at their own peril.