Joe Biden is desperate.
And he should be.
The world is an uglier and uglier place under Biden. Nearly no one believes the country is moving in the right direction.
And Biden is clearly an ailing man. He’s not with it, and everyone knows it.
That includes, apparently, former president Barack Obama.
According to the Washington Post:
Former president Barack Obama has raised questions about the structure of President Biden’s reelection campaign, discussing the matter directly with Biden and telling the president’s aides and allies the campaign needs to be empowered to make decisions without clearing them with the White House, according to three people familiar with the conversations.
In other words, Obama is telling Biden to outsource his campaign to people … other than Joe Biden. Apparently, Obama grew “animated” in discussing the election, and recommended David Plouffe, Obama’s own 2008 campaign manager, to head the effort.
Other Democrats are also worried about Biden’s reelect chances. “Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), who is running for her state’s open Senate seat, has expressed concern to allies that she may not be able to win if Biden is at the top of the ticket, according to people familiar with the conversations,” the Post reports.
Axios has reported similar findings, saying that “many high-level Democrats think it’s not fine. They fear the president’s political machine hasn’t found the sweet spot between a chill Zen and dangerous complacency — and has been way too Zen.”
Biden allies are worried that his base won’t show up.
So Biden is turning to his last messaging refuge: Stop Donald Trump.
That’s what his speech in Valley Forge on Friday was all about.
It was a strange place to effectively launch his reelection campaign. Valley Forge immediately spells negativity: a nation under attack, trying to live through its darkest moment. It’s not about hope or change. It’s about soldiering through winter. It’s about gangrene and frostbite.
That’s not a recipe for reelection success.
So the theme of Biden’s speech was that he is like George Washington and Trump is like Adolph Hitler. He did not really differentiate between Trump and his followers; he did not really differentiate between Trump’s followers and other Republicans; he did not really differentiate between Trump voters who don’t like the events of January 6 and those who do. Everyone who would vote for Trump was lumped together.
And that’s a dangerous play. It’s the same play Hillary Clinton made in 2016 when she suggested Trump was the leader of the deplorables. And people did not show up to vote for her.
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What happens this time when you have an elderly, ailing, fragile old man who has tyrannically used the power of the executive in order to overthrow generations of precedent with regard to what the president can or cannot do, standing up and declaring that his political enemies are actual enemies of the Republic itself?
That’s why he was at Valley Forge: He wants the dark; he wants the cold. He wants you to feel that, but he wants you to feel that about Trump — not about his administration.
Biden attacking Trump as a candidate with reference to January 6 — particularly as opposed to what Trump will do as president or what his agenda is as president — is not going to play. Why? Because the date on the calendar is January 8, 2024. We are now three full years removed from January 6, and in that intervening time, Trump has not been the president of the United States.
For all the talk about how horrible January 6 was, it did not actually stop the peaceful transition of power in the United States. Donald Trump left office on Inauguration Day and Joe Biden became president.
Since then Biden has been president for three years — and he doesn’t want to talk about any of it.
He just wants to talk about how Donald Trump is a threat to the Republic.
There’s one significant problem with that: Joe Biden is an actual threat to the Republic.