Joe Biden’s second basement campaign

Joe Biden in his official campaign launch video. Picture: Reuters

A three-minute video issued at the crack of dawn on Tuesday was a strange way to launch Joe Biden’s re-election bid. Granted, Barack 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 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 to, 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 Biden on display in person. Instead we got a video.

The short film appealed almost exclusively to the Democrat base, elements of which aren’t enthusiastic about a second Biden run. The video featured Democrat 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 blase.

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organisation 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.

Voting-rights reform isn’t necessarily a winner, either: Brian Kemp, Georgia’s Republican governor, signed an election-law reform and soundly beat the High Priestess of voting Rights, Stacey Abrams, for the second time in the November mid-term elections.

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 per cent of respondents say America is on the wrong track. Biden doesn’t like talking about these issues, but he won’t be able to avoid them during the campaign.

Some Democrat pooh-bahs posit that 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. 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. House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy faced 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. McCarthy could easily have fallen short. But on Wednesday, the speaker’s Limit, Save, Grow Act passed 217-215. Now the White House has a problem. An April 11 American Viewpoint poll of 87 battleground congressional districts shows that 37 per cent of voters favour the administration’s position of raising the debt ceiling without cutting spending while 50 per cent want cuts to accompany any ceiling increase.

The Wall Street Journal

Karl Rove helped organise the political-action committee American Crossroads and is author of The Triumph of William McKinley (Simon & Schuster, 2015).