The gloves are off. A vigorous 81-year-old President Joe Biden in his State of the Union address to Congress last week came out swinging at the man he deigned only to refer to – 13 times – as “my predecessor”. A man, he said, who would jeopardise freedom in refusing to stand up for Ukraine, who would roll back women’s rights to abortion and IVF, and, lest anyone forget, who was responsible for the attempted insurrection of January 2021.
Eight months before voters go to the polls, the speech marked the de facto end of the primary season and the beginnings of the real battle, with Donald Trump, who is running just ahead in the polls.
Biden’s energetic hour-and-a-quarter speech, replete with off-script ad libs, may do something to answer the age case against him.
“Nobody is going to talk about cognitive impairment now,” a New York Democrat told him optimistically. Biden did not take the issue on directly, joking :”I know I may not look like it, but I’ve been around a while,” and pointedly alluding to Trump’s own age.
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His major challenge is to persuade voters unconvinced by the real surge in the US economy. He spoke of the 15 million new jobs added in three years, unemployment at a 50-year low, and inflation down at 3 per cent as “the greatest comeback story never told”. And if they still did not believe, he layered on a very traditional Democratic message of solidarity with working people, his own pride in being the first president on a picket line, his commitment to taxation of the very rich and curbing prices of medicine and the profits of Big Pharma.
There was also a job to be done healing party divisions over his perceived uncritical support for Israel. His firm warning to the latter that it cannot consider humanitarian aid “as secondary or a bargaining chip” and the promise to bypass Israeli border controls by building a port for Gaza may go some way to mend those fences.
President Biden has tried to set out the battle lines for November on his terms. But it will be a long and bruising campaign.