[While the president once pitched himself as “a bridge” to a
new generation of Democratic leaders, he has decided that he is not
ready to turn the torch over yet.]
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BIDEN ANNOUNCES RE-ELECTION BID, DEFYING TRUMP AND HISTORY  
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Peter Baker
April 25, 2023
The New York Times
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_ While the president once pitched himself as “a bridge” to a new
generation of Democratic leaders, he has decided that he is not ready
to turn the torch over yet. _

President Biden is already the oldest president in American history
and, if he were to win again, he would be 86 at the end of a second
term., Doug Mills/The New York Times

 

WASHINGTON — President Biden formally announced on Tuesday that he
would seek a second term, arguing that American democracy still faces
a profound threat from former President Donald J. Trump as he set up
the possibility of a climactic rematch between the two next year.

In a video that opens with images of a mob of Trump supporters
storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the president said that the
“fight for our democracy” has “been the work of my first term”
but is incomplete while his predecessor mounts a comeback campaign for
his old office that Mr. Biden suggested would endanger fundamental
rights.

“Around the country, MAGA extremists are lining up to take on those
bedrock freedoms,” Mr. Biden said, using Mr. Trump’s Make America
Great Again slogan to describe the former president’s allies.
“Cutting Social Security that you’ve paid for your entire life
while cutting taxes for the very wealthy. Dictating what health care
decisions women can make, banning books and telling people who they
can love. All while making it more difficult for you to be able to
vote.

“When I ran for president four years ago,” he added, “I said we
were in a battle for the soul of America. And we still are.”

In a speech later in the day to a supportive labor group in
Washington, Mr. Biden focused more on bread-and-butter issues,
boasting of his record of creating jobs and financing new roads and
bridges. “Let’s finish the job,” he said, repeating his slogan
of late to a crowd that obligingly chanted, “Four more years!”

The official declaration finally ended any lingering suspense over Mr.
Biden’s intentions and effectively cleared the way to another
nomination for the president, barring unforeseen developments. While
he had repeatedly and consistently said he intended to run, Mr. Biden
stoked renewed speculation by delaying his kickoff for months. Now his
team can assemble the formal structure of a campaign organization and
raise money to finance it.

Mr. Biden tapped Julie Chávez Rodríguez, a senior White House
adviser and granddaughter of the iconic labor leader Cesar Chávez, as
his campaign manager. Quentin Fulks, a Democratic operative who most
recently ran Senator Raphael Warnock’s 2022 re-election campaign in
Georgia, will serve as her principal deputy. But the operation is
expected to be overseen from the White House by top presidential
aides.

Although he described himself as “a bridge” to the next generation
during his 2020 campaign, a comment that some interpreted as a hint
that he would serve only one term, Mr. Biden concluded that he was not
in fact ready to hand over the torch yet. His decision was fueled in
part, aides said, by his antipathy for Mr. Trump and his belief that
he is the Democrat best positioned to keep the criminally indicted and
twice-impeached former president from recapturing the White House.

In offering himself as a candidate again, Mr. Biden is asking
Americans to trust him with the powers of the commander in chief well
into his ninth decade. At age 80, Mr. Biden is already the oldest
president in American history, and, if he were to win, he would be 86
at the end of a second term, nearly nine years older than Ronald
Reagan was when he left the White House in 1989. Mr. Trump, no
youngster at 76, would himself outlast every president by age if he
were restored to the Oval Office and finished his new term at 82.

 
As Mr. Biden formally kicked off his campaign, he appeared at this
point to be a virtual lock to win his party’s nomination. While many
Democrats had hoped he would cede to a younger candidate, no
formidable challenger for the nomination has emerged. Robert F.
Kennedy Jr.
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a son of the iconic assassinated senator and a vocal critic of
vaccines, and Marianne Williamson
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the self-help author whose 2020 campaign fizzled before the first
votes were cast, have announced long-shot bids but pose little evident
threat to the incumbent president.

If Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump square off again next year, it would be the
first time that the same nominees faced each other in consecutive
presidential elections since 1956, when Dwight D. Eisenhower beat
Adlai Stevenson for the second time. It would also be the first time a
president was challenged by his predecessor since Theodore Roosevelt
attempted a comeback in 1912 against his handpicked successor, William
Howard Taft, in a three-way campaign won by Woodrow Wilson.

While Mr. Biden presides over a more unified party than his potential
challenger does, many Democrats privately worry that the president may
not be up to another campaign. His overall approval rating remains
mired at just over 42 percent, according to an aggregation of polls by
the political website FiveThirtyEight
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lower than 10 of the last 13 presidents at this point in their terms.

While polls show that most Democrats have favorable opinions about Mr.
Biden, a majority of them would still rather he not run again. In a
survey by NBC News released this week
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70 percent of Americans, including 51 percent of Democrats, said he
should not seek a second term. Seven out of 10 of those who did not
want him to serve four more years cited his age as a factor.

Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump face a strikingly competitive race
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with recent polls by Yahoo News, The Wall Street Journal and Morning
Consult showing the president slightly ahead while surveys by The
Economist and the Harvard University Center for American Political
Studies find him trailing by several points. Mr. Biden faces similarly
mixed results against Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, the strongest
challenger to Mr. Trump for the Republican nomination.

Mr. Trump did not even wait for Mr. Biden’s video to be posted to
attack the president’s re-election announcement, castigating him in
a statement on Monday night
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for high inflation, gas prices and illegal immigration. “You could
take the five worst presidents in American history, and put them
together, and they would not have done the damage Joe Biden has done
to our nation in just a few short years,” Mr. Trump said in a
statement. “Not even close.”

Mr. Biden’s announcement represented the latest improbable chapter
in a long life in public office, the fourth time he has thrown his hat
in the presidential ring and presumably the last campaign of a
half-century-plus career that began with his election to the New
Castle County Council in 1970.

Over the course of 36 years in the Senate, eight years as vice
president and campaigns for the White House in 1988, 2008 and 2020,
Mr. Biden has become one of the most familiar faces in American life,
known for his resilience in adversity as well as his habitual gaffes.
And yet the avuncular, backslapping, work-across-the-aisle deal maker
has struggled to translate decades of good will into the unifying
presidency he promised.

Working with the narrowest of partisan margins in Congress, Mr. Biden
in his first two years scored some of the most ambitious legislative
victories of any modern president, including a $1.9 trillion Covid-19
relief package; a $1 trillion program to rebuild the nation’s roads,
highways, airports and other infrastructure; and major investments to
combat climate change, lower prescription drug costs for seniors,
treat veterans exposed to toxic burn pits and build up the nation’s
semiconductor industry. Some of those bills passed with Republican
votes.

Along the way, he has revitalized international alliances that had
frayed under Mr. Trump, rallying NATO and other partners around the
world to stand against Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. With
bipartisan support, he has committed more than $100 billion to arm
Ukraine’s military and help its government and people survive the
Russian onslaught.

Yet his decision to withdraw forces from Afghanistan after 20 years in
keeping with an agreement with the Taliban struck by Mr. Trump led to
a debacle in 2021 in which the radical militants took over the
country, fleeing Afghans swarmed American airplanes taking off from
Kabul and a suicide bomber killed 13 American troops and 170 Afghans
during the withdrawal.

Mr. Biden has also struggled to secure the southwestern U.S. border,
where illegal migration has soared, and he has had mixed success in
stabilizing the post-pandemic economy, which saw inflation rise to its
highest level in four decades and gas prices shoot up to record
levels. While both have begun to come back down and unemployment is
near historic lows, many Americans remain unsettled by economic
anxiety.

Perhaps most frustrating to Mr. Biden, his hopes to heal the rifts
that widened under Mr. Trump have so far been dashed, with American
society still deeply polarized and his predecessor still a potent
force in stirring the forces of division and emboldening white
supremacists and anti-Semites.

The president’s critics say that Mr. Biden is the one who is
divisive because of his attacks on Mr. Trump’s “ultra-MAGA
Republicans,” and they portray him as a socialist bent on destroying
the country. Regardless of whom they nominate, Republicans expect to
challenge Mr. Biden next year by linking him to the nation’s
economic troubles and depicting him as a feckless leader held captive
by his party’s activist left.

Even as Mr. Biden put off a formal kickoff to his re-election bid, his
team had been quietly making plans for the coming campaign. Top
advisers such as Anita Dunn, Steven J. Ricchetti and Jennifer
O’Malley Dillon will oversee the campaign from the White House even
though the operation’s formal headquarters will almost certainly be
in Wilmington, Del., under Ms. Chávez Rodríguez’s direction.

But it will be much different than any campaign in which Mr. Biden has
ever run. His first two bids for the White House each collapsed by the
end of the first caucus, in an era long before the ubiquitous presence
of social media and modern technological techniques, and his 2020
campaign was warped by the Covid-19 pandemic, which kept him largely
isolated at his home in Delaware.

This time aides said he planned a vigorous campaign travel schedule
but would lean heavily on digital communications that bypass the
traditional news media. The emerging contest will be complicated by
the fact that his opponent is under criminal indictment by a local
Democratic prosecutor in New York on charges of covering up hush money
paid to a porn star and is being investigated by Mr. Biden’s own
Justice Department for instigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the
Capitol and illegally refusing to turn over classified documents.

Although Mr. Biden has remained publicly silent on Mr. Trump’s legal
troubles, the former president has tried to blame the incumbent,
accusing him of wielding the justice system against him out of
partisan animus. No evidence of that has surfaced, but Mr. Biden’s
own handling of classified documents is being investigated by a
special counsel and his son Hunter Biden is being investigated by
another federal prosecutor.

Mr. Biden’s strategists recognize that he starts off the campaign
with significant vulnerabilities but are banking on the idea that
however ambivalent swing voters may be about him, they are dead set
against putting Mr. Trump back in the White House. If they face
another Republican, they plan to argue that anyone who wins that
party’s nomination will have to adopt the same radical positions as
Mr. Trump.

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Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent and has covered the
last five presidents for The Times and The Washington Post. He is the
author of seven books, most recently “The Divider: Trump in the
White House, 2017-2021,” with Susan Glasser. 

* President Biden; 2024 Election; Biden vs Trump;
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