First the media said Joe Biden, somehow adored by Americans across the political spectrum for half a century, was going to have a fatal #MeToo problem. Then they said Biden, the affable sidekick to our nation’s first black president, was going to have a fatal race problem. Now they’re saying Biden, who’d be running in a general election against a professional Twitter troll, has a gaffe problem, and we’re half a news cycle away from the age problem emerging as the marquee talking point.
Yet Biden’s average polling hasn’t budged below the the 26% mark this entire primary season, and despite some early errors in faltering under the fire of the Left, Biden’s first television spot proves that he’s playing to win the White House, not woke appreciation points.
In a 60-second spot set to hit Iowa markets, the former vice president presents himself as the positive and forceful leader of a movement against President Trump, not Trump’s supporters. Just as he did in his campaign launch, he specifically highlighted the neo-Nazi Charlottesville march and paints Trump not as an agent of economic populism or the forgotten man, but as a deviation of the country’s norms.
We all know in our bones that this election is different. The stakes are higher. The threat is more serious. We have to beat Donald Trump.
That’s the message we lay out in our first TV ad hitting the airwaves today. Watch it below: pic.twitter.com/5y3l3qXNSg
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) August 20, 2019
Barack Obama refuses to back a horse in the primary, but Biden still has a decade of footage tying him to his legacy. He emphatically celebrates the Affordable Care Act in a compelling rebuke to his opponents who wish to scrap the entire private insurance market, and most crucially, lays out the polling that demonstrates he’s the best statistical bet to beat Trump.
Biden seems to be the only major 2020 contender to understand that 80,000 Americans in the Rust Belt handed Trump the Oval, not millions of supposed racists that once voted for Obama. The front-runner carefully describes Trump in apolitical language, “erratic, vicious, bullying,” all words that ring true and fail to offend the pivotal center of the country tired of the tweets but equally fed up with the Left’s endless character attacks on ordinary Americans.
With half a year to go until the Iowa caucuses and around 10% of Democrats polled still undecided, it’s very possible that a dark horse with high potential but limited media exposure thus far could break out and join the second tier (perhaps Julián Castro or Amy Klobuchar). But this race is looking more and more like a two-person race: Biden versus whichever Democrat can claim the mantle of the radical Left.
