Biden makes his opening bid: It’s all about Trump
By Dan Balz Dan Balz Chief correspondent covering national politics, the presidency and Congress Email Bio Follow April 25 at 12:28 PM Joe Biden joined the presidential race with a message strikingly different than that of his rivals for the Democratic nomination. In words and images reflecting a sense of national urgency, the vice president defined the election and his own candidacy almost solely as a crusade to rid the country of President Trump.
Biden described this moment and the coming election as a battle for the soul of the nation, reduced in political terms to a question of whether Trump’s presidency ends after a single term or extends to a second term. If Trump is defeated in 2020, Biden said, history may well judge these years simply as “an aberrant moment in time.” He added, “But if we give Donald Trump eight years in the White house, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation.
Western Pennsylvania is at the heart of the electorate that Trump carried in 2016 and where Democrats must recoup if they hope to win in 2020. The Monday rally, symbolically, will be Biden’s way of saying to Democrats that if you want someone who can win back Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, look no farther than me. It will be his way of saying that he, better than others in the race, can rekindle enthusiasm among white working-class voters who have abandoned the party.
More recently, he was confronted by criticism from some women who found his hands-on expressions of empathy and support discomforting. Though Biden promised to do better, he later seemed to dismiss it all with a few jokes at a public event. A politician of the old school, he now runs in the era of #MeToo and will be challenged to show, as he put it when responding to the criticism, that he does “get it.
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