The former vice president must persuade a party yearning for fresh faces and candidates of color.
Joe Biden officially announced his bid for president Thursday, marking the third White House campaign of his lengthy political career but the first in which he enters as a frontrunner.
The former vice president and longtime Delaware senator joins a historically diverse field of first-time presidential candidates who reflect the party’s yearning for fresh faces and women and candidates of color — a paradox that the 76-year-old white Washington insider is hoping to reconcile through his association with a Democratic president beloved by the party base: Barack Obama.
Biden announced his intentions in a video posted at 6 a.m. on social media in which he accused President Trump of using a “moral equivalence” by failing to distinguish between white supremacists who protested at Charlottesville in 2017 and the demonstrators who opposed them in what became a violent clash that claimed a woman’s life.
“In that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime,” Biden said. “I wrote at the time that we’re in a battle for the soul of this nation. Well, that’s even more true to today.”
Biden said that “history will look back, on four years of this president and all he embraces, as an aberrant moment in time. But if we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation — who we are — and I cannot stand by and watch that happen.”
For months, Biden anguished about whether to mount another White House run. He privately worried about whether his time had passed, whether he could raise the big money for a long campaign, whether the Democratic Party had shifted too far left beyond his brand of center-left politics and even if the party wanted a septuagenarian white male as a nominee.
The core values of this nation… our standing in the world… our very democracy…everything that has made America — America –is at stake. That’s why today I’m announcing my candidacy for President of the United States. #Joe2020 https://t.co/jzaQbyTEz3
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) April 25, 2019
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Joe Biden officially announced his bid for president Thursdayhttps://t.co/JT8Bp1jZsh
— POLITICO (@politico) April 25, 2019
Barack Obama offered some warm words for Joe Biden on Thursday, but notably did not endorse himhttps://t.co/zaJrDFEiha
— POLITICO (@politico) April 25, 2019
2/ It's a nontrivial matter. There's many a slip twixt the cup and the lip for Joe, and his oppo book is about three miles thick, but he's a known quantity, he loves the media and the media loves him, and he's lost every goddamn thing in the world that matters and keeps going.
— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) April 25, 2019
4/ An aside: in my handful of encounters with Biden, he's affable, likable, and engages with people in a hearty, warm way. Not a lot of the "take these filthy peasants away and bathe me in Purell" fussiness. Does that matter? I think it might. We'll see.
— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) April 25, 2019
7/ Open questions: can he raise the $? What does Obama do? How does this shape the field? Does Biden's good-guy populism scale? Watch Fox very carefully in the next 48 hours. It'll be a great tell as to how Trump world feels about Biden.
So endeth.
— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) April 25, 2019
#BREAKING: Biden says he asked Obama not to endorse him https://t.co/1vxEC4R5lJ pic.twitter.com/3ZnAi3WB7K
— The Hill (@thehill) April 25, 2019
You know, if it wasn’t for the current socialist platform of the Democrat Party (New Green Deal, Medicare for All, slavery reparations, an open door policy for illegal immigrants and alleged refugees, etc.), I’d almost vote for Biden. He’s a bit off the wall, but he would be far classier than the current occupant of the White House.
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