A three-minute video issued at the crack of dawn Tuesday was a strange way to launch President Biden’s re-election bid. Granted, President Obama announced he would run for a second term by video in April 2011, but no one questioned his energy and mental acuity.
Not so for Mr. Biden. Many doubt he can last another term. If he’s re-elected and serves four years, he would be 86—older than all but seven former presidents ever lived, including Jimmy Carter, who is 98 and left office at 56.
You would think the president’s team would try assuaging the public’s concerns by putting a vigorous, sharp Mr. Biden on display in person. Instead we got a video.
The short film appealed almost exclusively to the Democratic base, elements of which aren’t enthusiastic about a second Biden run. The video featured Democratic go-to issues—abortion and voting rights—and familiar attacks, including the charge that Republicans want to gut Social Security to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy. It was all pro forma and blasé.
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization gave Democrats an opening on abortion, but the reproductive-rights lobby’s absolutist position of no restrictions in the second or third trimester isn’t so popular in general elections. Consider the big victories of pro-life governors in Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Ohio and Texas last fall.
Voting-rights reform isn’t necessarily a winner either: Brian Kemp, Georgia’s Republican governor, signed a major election-law reform and soundly beat the High Priestess of Voting Rights, Stacey Abrams, for the second time, even after Mr. Biden and others criticized the state’s law.
Missing from Tuesday’s video were mentions of the inflation ravaging family budgets, recession worries, Russia’s war on Ukraine, the Chinese threat, crime and the crisis at the southern border. These issues are why the RealClearPolitics polling average shows that nearly 65% of respondents say America is on the wrong track. Mr. Biden doesn’t like talking about these issues, but he won’t be able to avoid them during the campaign.
Some Democratic pooh-bahs posit that Mr. Biden needed to announce now, instead of later in the spring or early summer as originally thought, to start raising money. If so, that’s worrisome. Abundant money should be available for a sitting president. But perhaps donors are resisting Team Biden.
Tuesday’s video will leave no strong imprint, and news of the president’s announcement will be drowned out by the debt-ceiling fight in Congress, which heats up this week with a crucial House vote. West Wing politicos may not have a problem with that, thinking that a low-key campaign by video may work in 2024, just as campaigning from that Delaware basement did in 2020, especially if the election is a rematch with Donald Trump.
It might not play out that way. Take the debt ceiling. Speaker Kevin McCarthyfaced a difficult challenge in corralling a majority to pass a GOP bill that raises the debt ceiling while reducing spending. There are 222 Republicans, and 16 had never voted to raise the debt ceiling. Mr. McCarthy could easily have fallen short.
A three-minute video issued at the crack of dawn Tuesday was a strange way to launch President Biden’s re-election bid. Granted, President Obama announced he would run for a second term by video in April 2011, but no one questioned his energy and mental acuity.
Not so for Mr. Biden. Many doubt he can last another term. If he’s re-elected and serves four years, he would be 86—older than all but seven former presidents ever lived, including Jimmy Carter, who is 98 and left office at 56.
You would think the president’s team would try assuaging the public’s concerns by putting a vigorous, sharp Mr. Biden on display in person. Instead we got a video.
The short film appealed almost exclusively to the Democratic base, elements of which aren’t enthusiastic about a second Biden run. The video featured Democratic go-to issues—abortion and voting rights—and familiar attacks, including the charge that Republicans want to gut Social Security to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy. It was all pro forma and blasé.
