MANCHESTER, New Hampshire—Dean Phillips, the newly minted 2024 primary challenger to President Joe Biden, made a lofty promise to hold 119 town halls in New Hampshire in 13 weeks.
But if the other 118 town halls are anything like the first, the Minnesota congressman—and New Hampshire voters—may be in for a painful ride.
By the end of Phillips’ three-hour event in Manchester on Wednesday night, two voters had been thrown out after a tense exchange with the candidate over Israel, one voter stormed out when trying to defend the person who had been thrown out, and the candidate’s team was preparing to scrub the recording of the event from the internet.
Indeed, less than an hour after the doors closed, the Phillips campaign appeared to unlist the livestream of the event from YouTube—meaning no one can watch the video unless they already watched the stream and have the original link.
The Phillips campaign did not respond to a request for comment about why the video was unlisted and whether it had anything to do with an exchange Phillips initially said he was glad to hash out “in front of the cameras.” Notably, the livestream of Phillips’ campaign launch event is still available on his YouTube page.
What transpired at the Rex Theatre on Wednesday night is only known to the handful of reporters who were there, and a crowd that consisted of many of the candidate’s personal contacts. Phillips’ mother, DeeDee, was in the crowd; his wife, Annalise, sang with the opening band.
At first, the 54-year old presidential hopeful was seemingly off to an auspicious start. The Phillips advance team kitted out the venue with extra lighting, at least five camera rigs—including an intricate setup with a retail value of over $12,000 for a jib and digital camera alone—and an open-air control room, where an event staffer could be heard loudly whispering commands for the camera men.
With such high production value, it’s unlikely the event was meant to only be watched live and not archived for curious voters to watch later.
But expensive equipment could not save Phillips from some self-inflicted wounds.
“I was a hockey goalie in Minnesota, so I’m used to taking shots,” Phillips said of criticism leveled at him in recent weeks from a Democratic Party that is uniformly uninterested in his primary challenge. “In fact, my mother is here, and she never went to my hockey games because it was very difficult. But now, she has to watch this! But those shots inspire me.”
But the candidate could seemingly not handle a shot from Atong Chan, a 23-year-old Black woman from Manchester who said she was born in a refugee camp in Kenya. Chan grilled Phillips on why he hasn’t yet called for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
“I have to tell ya,” Phillips said after a four-minute buildup to the thrust of the question about a ceasefire, “I took note of it, you didn’t mention—how do you feel about the Israeli babies? And moms, and dads, and grandmas, and hostages in Gaza who were brutally murdered. Before I answer your question, I want to understand if that empathy is across humanity, or only for Palestinians?”
The congressman’s immediate response did not land well.
“For you to say that makes me feel like you—” Chan said, before Phillips cut her off.
Heavy crosstalk ensued. Chan accused Phillips of gaslighting her, and when the congressman tried to respond, another man in the crowd came to Chan’s defense. Toward the end of the nearly 15-minute exchange, Chan and a friend were escorted out of the building as she began yelling at Phillips.
The optics were more than ironic for Phillips, whose long-running slogan—which adorns the side of his campaign bus—is “Everyone’s Invited!”
“This is so embarrassing for you,” Chan told the candidate, “and you want to make it seem like it was embarrassing for me.”
While Phillips was supposed to take questions from voters that night, he wasn’t supposed to take them from the press. The initial word from the campaign was that the candidate was on a “media blackout” until his Friday night appearance on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher—but the candidate eventually succumbed to a swarm of reporters.
In a press gaggle, Phillips accused The Daily Beast of being part of the problem—what he earlier characterized as the “rage industrial complex” in the media—for wanting to ask him about the heated exchange with Chan.
“What you’re doing right now is what you do, which is to focus on one thing—this is exactly what I’m talking about, I’m so glad you asked that—this is what attracts the eyeballs,” he said.
“It’s the fights. It’s the division,” Phillips continued. “And you’re not going to ask a single question about the 99 percent of other people in the room who were thoughtful, respectful, had just as much interest in coming here to have their questions issued and answered.”
Chan, who said she voted for Biden both in the 2020 New Hampshire primary and in the general election, told The Daily Beast she’s considering sitting out 2024 altogether after the interaction with Phillips.
“It’s like he’s cosplaying something he’s not,” she said of the congressman.
Although Phillips has made the case that Biden’s polling numbers are bad—which is correct—his message that Democratic voters should elect a third-term House member in order to avoid a second Donald Trump term seems to have a limited constituency.
Phillips’ campaign launch in New Hampshire last week was more memorable for its awkward moments and a non-answer the candidate gave to The Daily Beast about a past donation from conservative billionaire Harlan Crow, whose ties to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas have come under immense scrutiny following investigations from ProPublica.
But the town hall wasn’t all rough patches. At one point, Phillips opened up about a deeper motivation behind his run. He described traveling to Vietnam to visit the site where his father died during the war, collecting a jar of dirt to commemorate him. At just 6months old when his father died in that helicopter crash, Phillips has lived his entire life under the trauma of a tragedy ultimately stemming from a president’s decision to send troops into war.
Falling back into his happy warrior brand, Phillips cast the Israel blowup as a case study in the political divisions he says he is trying to mend.
“In a way,” Phillips said as fading screaming could be heard from the lobby, “I’m glad this occurred in front of you and in front of the cameras.”
Another rich guy who thinks he’s God. And he’s willing to give vast sums to “consultants” (Steve Schmidt) who are doing a very bad job. Wilson has an ax to grind against Schmidt but he’s not wrong.
Maybe No Labels can put him and Doug Burgam on their ticket and squeeze them for a few extra million.
