Biden 2024’s shaky foundations

The shaky foundations of Biden 2024

Joe Biden promised to “finish the job” in a video announcing his 2024 run released Monday. A year and a half out, the president’s reelection pitch has serious flaws and yet, with Ron DeSantis failing to make any headway against an indicted Donald Trump, you can understand why Biden and his team might be feeling confident about their chances.

Before we unpack that paradox, a quick reminder of the weaknesses of Biden as a candidate next year. There’s his age, of course, and all the embarrassments it brings and stage-managing it…

The shaky foundations of Biden 2024

Joe Biden promised to “finish the job” in a video announcing his 2024 run released Monday. A year and a half out, the president’s reelection pitch has serious flaws and yet, with Ron DeSantis failing to make any headway against an indicted Donald Trump, you can understand why Biden and his team might be feeling confident about their chances.

Before we unpack that paradox, a quick reminder of the weaknesses of Biden as a candidate next year. There’s his age, of course, and all the embarrassments it brings and stage-managing it demands. (Note that he will not have the cover of a pandemic this time around.) There’s the unimpressive economic record. (His launch video was notably light on claims about the health of the US economy.) There’s a vice president whose public reputation as a gaffe-prone dud is well established. And there are his underwater approval ratings.

As my colleague Ben Domenech points out, Biden’s launch video is the kind of thing made by a campaign betting that their opponent will be Donald Trump — and relishing a rematch. And in its negative focus on the danger of handing power to the other side, it reveals what Ben calls a “brittle case for Biden’s reelection. A reelection based on fearmongering instead of hope has an admission of failure as its subtext.”

In other words, Biden’s launch suggests a candidate who does not deserve another four years in the job. But whether that is what Biden gets is a practical political matter, not a question of cosmic justice. And finding whatever cynical strategy it takes to “finish the job” is what Biden’s battle-hardened advisors have proved effective at, both in 2020 and 2022. Here, Biden’s greatest strength may prove to be an awareness of his weakness. Especially if he finds himself up against a man not famous for his self-awareness.

Even if the lineup is the same, 2024 will not be like 2020. Last time around, voters had a generally favorable view of Biden, and a generally unfavorable view of Trump. In 2024, things look a little different. Biden has joined Trump in the unfavorable club, and voters would be choosing between two unpopular candidates. Just like in 2016. In that case, victory went to the candidate who won over a bigger share of voters who had an unfavorable view of both choices.

Trump’s 2016 victory was more a product of half-hearted compromise than of cultish enthusiasm. It is very early days, but it is the Biden campaign that seems to be more realistic about the nature of the fight this time around. “Listen, at least we’re not crazy” is his message to the unenthusiastic middle. That pitch is, in part, based on hyperbolic rhetoric and, at times, demagogic fear-mongering by the president and his party. But it also draws on very real excesses on the right and undeniable differences between the position of the GOP and the median voter on abortion, as well as a chasm between the hang-ups of the Republican frontrunner and the priorities of the voters he needs if he is to win another White House stint.

Democrats have their own version of that problem: from crime to inflation, they are mistrusted by large majorities on some of the issues that matter most. Combine those problems with Biden’s unavoidable deficiencies and you have a beatable candidate. But also a candidate who knows how to eek out a win against a similarly flawed rival.

On our radar

HALEY POKES ‘SANCTIMONIOUS’ FLORIDA Reacting to the news that Disney will be taking its fight with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to the courts, 2024 presidential candidate and former governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley said her state would “happily accept your 70,000+ jobs if you wanted to leave Florida… SC’s not woke, but we’re not sanctimonious about it either.”

HOUSE DEBATES DEBT BILL Kevin McCarthy and House Republicans are pressing towards a vote on their debt limit bill. McCarthy is locked in a battle that will test his credibility as speaker. The House vote could come as early as this evening

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Thiel sits out 2024

Tech billionaire and one-time Trump backer Peter Thiel is sick of the culture war, and so, will not contribute his fortune to the 2024 presidential race, reports Reuters.

According to sources, Thiel, who founded PayPal with Elon Musk and sat on the board of Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta until last year, “believes Republicans are making a mistake in focusing on cultural flashpoints and should be more concerned with spurring US innovation — a major issue for him — and competing with China.”

Thiel, who is gay, has spoken in the past about how “fake culture wars only distract us from our economic decline.” Most recently, Thiel supported Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio and Senate-hopeful Blake Masters in Arizona. The Guardian reported that Thiel had donated an estimated “$25 million to fifteen other 2022 candidates for the House and Senate towing the Trump election fraud line.”

It will be interesting to see what Thiel’s retreat from funding the culture war means for Republican presidential hopefuls — Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley and yet-to-be-announced Ron DeSantis — who are hinging their campaigns on social issues and the fight against woke culture.

–Teresa Mull

Two California problems plague Biden’s latest cabinet confirmation

Democrats have a pair of California problems that are threatening to jeopardize President Joe Biden’s latest controversial nominee.

Julie Su, who currently serves as the acting secretary of labor, was tapped by Biden to succeed Secretary Marty Walsh — and it’s seeming like her partisan vote out of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee may be the last bit of good news for her — and Democrats have California to blame.

While Democrats, socialists and labor unions are excited about Su’s potential to counter corporate greed, Republicans are actually seizing on her record of enabling rampant greed on a massive scale; Su oversaw at least $30 billion of fraud in California’s pandemic unemployment insurance program, a key GOP sticking point — even rappers like Nuke Bizzle rapped about how easy it was to defraud the program previously run by Su… before he was arrested for defrauding taxpayers.

“I done got rich off of EDD [Su’s program]. Ain’t hit no more licks ’cause of EDD. And just last night, I was sellin’ Ps. And I just woke up to 300 Gs,” Bizzle rapped; his song has racked up the views since Senator Bill Cassidy quoted it in committee hearings.

The Democrats’ other California problem is Senator Dianne Feinstein, who needs to be present for Su to have a chance. Any day she’s absent jeopardizes an already fragile vote-counting balance for Democrats, who aren’t even sure if they can rely on Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema — both of whom have been huge thorns in the administration’s side on nominations recently.

–Matthew Foldi