Biden paves the way for 2024

Joe Biden was just two minutes into his State of the Union speech when he made his first mistake. He called Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schummer a “minority leader.” It was nothing more than high fives, and the Republicans wringed their hands. Trump wrote on his social network Truth: “Big setback”. The Fox network has issued a warning. Twitter was in crisis. And yet that minimal three-letter excerpt, which Biden promptly corrected, was the juiciest part of an hour-long speech in which he hoped the octogenarian president’s mistakes would demonstrate his unfitness to run for president starting in 2024. his office, re-election.

The opposite happened before. In what was unusual for such a speech with Republicans, Biden showed reflexes and irony. He said it’s true that some of them are proposing cuts to social security and health care, and despite opposition protests and some harsh responses — Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Trump congresswoman who confused gazpacho with the Gestapo, got up and called – ao “Liar” – the president replied: “I like conversions,” he said, to laughter and applause from the Democrats. “As we seem to agree, Social Security and Medicare are already out of the question, aren’t they? We agree!”

Biden used the State of the Union address as an apparent springboard for his – still theoretically hypothetical – bid for re-election in 2024. He insisted that the job should be done, but what he mainly did was brag about the achievements of the first half of his mandate. Days earlier, at a Democratic National Committee event in Philadelphia, attendees chanted, “Four more years!” And after the speech, he visited Wisconsin, one of the crucial states, and Florida, the territory of Donald Trump and his likely Republican alternative, Governor Ron DeSantis, in two days.

The president has built a history of presenting himself as a defender of the people against the abuses of banks, oil companies, pharmaceutical companies and other major corporations. It shows the record number of jobs created in the past two years, and mostly manufacturing jobs, to court unions. It profiles itself as a guarantor of social security and public health. He attacks the risk to democracy inherent in extreme Trumpism and its electoral denial. And in foreign policy, after the serious setback of the Afghan withdrawal, he resolutely maintained command in support of Ukraine and opposed China.

Achievements of the first half of his tenure include the infrastructure bill designed to encourage microprocessor manufacturing and his tough climate, tax and health package, opportunistically (and misleadingly) dubbed the anti-inflation bill. Biden calls for the effect of these measures to be transferred to the citizen.

The price increases that lost so much popularity last year have lost their momentum. There is no end to the much-vaunted recession. And even the migratory flow, another target of Republican objectives, is faltering.

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Just when things were looking good, the discovery of confidential documents from his time as vice president in a former private office and at his home in Wilmington, Delaware sparked another backlash that Biden downplays. “As far as I know, they collected stuff from 1974 and lost papers,” he said in an interview this week. “When they packed [las cosas de] my offices, to move them, they have not done the kind of work that should be done to thoroughly review all documentation,” he added.

Biden cut the gap between disapproving and approving his term in half, but that’s still 11 points. Even worse, when Democratic voters and supporters are asked if they want him to run for re-election, 58% prefer another candidate, according to a recent ABC and Washington Post poll. Other research shows similar results.

End of second term at age 86

The question would of course be which other candidate, but there is no alternative. A sitting president usually has no major rivals in his party’s primaries. However, the case of Biden, who would begin a second term at age 82 and end at age 86, is unprecedented.

Age has already become a prominent issue in the 2020 campaign. Much attention has been paid to the choice of the vice presidential nominee as a possible replacement for 2024. Harris is likely to recapture the ticket from Biden. Other potential candidates have taken no action and have generally expressed their support for the president. The Democratic Party also redesigned the main calendar to meet Biden’s wishes.

The president’s official position is that he intends to run for re-election, but has not yet made the “decision”. “I’m not ready for this,” he said in a television interview this week. At the post-general election news conference on Nov. 8, he responded in the plural and in reference to wife Jill Biden to the question, “It is our intention to reintroduce ourselves.”

Then he continued without giving too many hints. It was leaked in December that during the dinner at the White House on the occasion of the state visit of French President Emmanuel Macron, the two presidents and first ladies toasted the 2024 election campaign (Biden, teetotal, raised his glass of Coca-Cola).

While the polls are not Biden’s friend, his 2020 victory and the November 8 general election result are favorable (much better than expected). Going against Trump would probably increase his chances of winning. It would be more difficult against a younger competitor, although the president assures that his decision does not depend on who faces him. Biden was not a very bright student, but he won the presidential election in high school. He continued to do so throughout his 50-year political career (as a candidate for Senator, Vice President, and President).

An announcement is expected in the coming weeks/months. If he decides to run, the second half of his term will be a battle between the president and the opposition, with a Republican majority in the Chamber of Deputies and few options for major action. Biden will try to brag about his achievements, while Republicans will try to harass him with investigations (some of which have already started).

This week, in an interview with PBS, Biden was again asked about his age: “Look at me. That’s all I can say.” According to the president, on the day of his speech, he heard people say, “Look at Biden, my God, age isn’t an issue anymore.” Of course, the president added, “I have a lot of respect for for fate. I would be absolutely honest with the American people if I felt a health problem, something that kept me from doing the job. And we’ll see. But I think people should pay attention to me.”