Joe Biden officially launched his re-election campaign this week, portraying the upcoming 2024 election as a battle to secure fundamental freedoms for Americans.
In a video uploaded to his social networks of just over three minutes, Biden makes a direct call to the camera overlaid with clips of him and his vice president, Kamala Harris, touring the country during his first term intertwined with scenes of the insurrection of September 6. January, abortion rights protests, and the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“Across the country, MAGA extremists are lining up to take away those fundamental freedoms,” Biden says as images of Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and Marjorie Taylor Greene flash around. The video of his re-election recalls his last ad for the presidency that he submitted exactly four years ago, which featured images of white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia: “When I ran for president four years ago, I said we were in a battle for the soul. of the United States, and we still are,” says Biden. “The question we face is whether in the coming years we will have more freedom or less freedom, more or less rights.”
While he makes no direct mention of Donald Trump, as he did in videos from 2019 when he launched his first campaign for president, Biden’s message is that extremism is not a problem that has been, nor will it be cured by banning it. Trump returns to the presidency. In the video’s title, Biden appropriates a word that Republicans, particularly DeSantis, have claimed as their own and used beyond recognition: freedom.
The video, which extensively outlines his plan to protect personal liberties and warns against threats posed by his Republican opponents, obviously fails to address the main concern regarding his re-election campaign: his age. Instead, it intercuts cuts of a bouncy president, jogging, walking, smiling, meeting people, traveling to the beat of inspiring instrumental music.
Under the slogan of “let’s finish what we started”, Biden shows in the video a diverse United States, with young and adult faces, from different cultures and in which he emphasizes the freedom to love who you want. Faced with the culture war and gender ideologies, Biden makes it very clear which side he is on, consistent with the policies that his government has presented regarding the confrontation that exists between Republicans and Democrats over the “identity of the nation.”
In a rare occurrence, the video also repeatedly highlights Vice President Kamala Harris, who would assume the presidency if Biden were to become incapacitated. At 58, Biden’s team hopes Harris’s presence can inject some life and energy into the campaign. It should be noted that, for example, then Vice President Biden did not appear in Barack Obama’s reelection video in 2012 as his vice president does now. Biden even uses Obama himself with a few-second image in which he remembers his time in the White House with Obama as president.
As the Biden presidency has been, the launch of his re-election campaign was utterly conventional and utterly normal, and by discreetly announcing his intention to run for the White House again, the way he did, warns again that he is not willing to change and that he trusts in the formula and strategy that led him to the presidency in 2020 even when a large part of the United States doubted his abilities and exalted his defects.
The video shows that Biden understands the challenge ahead: selling his gains on the environment, gun control, infrastructure, health care and more, as well as the understanding that voters in the United States continue to be frustrated with the state of the nation and politics. The strategy already worked for him in 2020, when Biden beat out younger challengers to become the nominee and then defeated Trump. His party also managed to exceed expectations in the 2022 midterm elections, winning a Senate seat and narrowly losing control of the House of Representatives.
For all the talk about his age and character, Biden is the only politician who can say he defeated Trump. His low-key release is at least an implicit reminder of what he’s not, and in the end, may be as effective campaign justification as it needs to be. Now, the party’s hopes of him are based on the calculation that he will once again be right for the political climate, even if events happen faster than he would like.
