Axelrod: Biden’s ‘flip-flop-flip’ on Hyde Amendment ‘raises questions’ about his campaign

CNN political commentator David Axelrod said Friday that former Vice President Joe Biden’s “flip-flop-flip” on the Hyde Amendment “raises questions” about how far the current front-runner will go in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.

The commentary from the chief strategist for former President Obama’s presidential campaigns comes after Biden said Thursday he no longer supports the Hyde Amendment, just one day after reiterating his longtime support for the ban on federal funding for abortions.  

{mosads}”His rollout was flawless in my view, and he’s had a very solid spring,” Axelrod said on CNN’s “New Day.” “But this underscores questions that people have had about whether he can go the distance.”

“One, because the virtue of having a long record and comforting people and being a figure of stability has the flip side that you have to defend positions that you’ve had over the course of 45 years in politics, some of which may have been acceptable in the day and not acceptable now,” Axelrod continued.

“So that was a flip-flop-flip,” he added. “Which is never a good thing in politics and it raises questions about his own performance and his own steadiness and his campaign’s performance.” 

Biden had pointed to recent abortion restrictions such as so-called heartbeat bans, which have recently passed in multiple states, as the justification for coming out against they Hyde Amendment. 

“If I believe health care is a right, as I do, I can no longer support an amendment that makes that right dependent on someone’s ZIP code,” he said at a recent Democratic National Committee gathering in Atlanta. 

Biden once enjoyed more than a 36-point lead over Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the RealClearPolitics index of polls, but that lead has shrunk to 16.8 points over Sanders as of Thursday.