The American president is officially embarking on the race for his succession. A real bet for the Democrats, as their champion has been unpopular lately.
He hesitated for a long time on the date, but the inspiration would have finally come to him from one of his favorite poems. This Tuesday, April 28, Joe Biden officially launched his presidential campaign for the 2024 election, four years to the day from the start of his victorious 2020 campaign.
The idea of marking this anniversary in this way appealed to the outgoing president: he saw in it the opportunity “to make history and hope rhyme”, thus taking up the verse of one of the most famous texts by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, Nobel Prize winner of literature in 2015 and prized author of the American president.
“Let’s finish the job,” tweeted the American president, to justify this candidacy for a new term.
Many successes…
Joe Biden begins his final campaign with a double paradox as his baggage. He has a substantial record, marked by ambitious reforms, but he is an unpopular president. His candidacy inspires skepticism even in his own camp. Yet no serious rival for the Democratic nomination has emerged.
It is undoubtedly on the economic front that the president has been most active. At the initiative of the White House, a 1.2 trillion dollar infrastructure investment plan was voted by Congress at the end of 2021. The “Inflation Reduction Act”, which caused so much reaction in Europe, promises some 400 billion dollars over ten years to manufacturers who will commit to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions and provides for a series of measures to reduce Americans’ health care bills.
Keeping an emblematic campaign promise, the president eliminated or substantially reduced the debt of 16 million American students (millions of additional files are still under study, nearly 40 million students are eligible for this program). 12 million jobs have been created since the start of Joe Biden’s term – at 3.5%, the unemployment rate is at its lowest in half a century.
The president also has other important markers to his credit: the first significant law in decades for strengthen the control of arms sales; enshrining in federal law new protections for same-sex and interracial marriages. He unhesitatingly took the lead of the Western coalition supporting Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression, bringing aid to kyiv approaching 70 billion dollars.
… but a clear unpopularity
But obviously, this much-vaunted record the White House website that on that of candidate Joe Biden does not print with a majority Americans. 42.3% of Americans approve of Joe Biden’s action, 53% are of the opposite opinion, according to the compilation of the latest polls carried out by FiveThirtyEight. A level considered as an alert rating by experts in electoral matters.
Certainly, eight out of ten Democrats approve of the president’s action, but only 44% think he is the best candidate for their party. Just as worrying, if not more, the independent voters (neither Democrats nor Republicans), whose mobilization is most of the time decisive, are only 26% to have a positive opinion of the action of Joe Biden.
Biden’s health in question
Beyond unpopularity, the other major obstacle on the road to a new mandate is obviously the age of the captain. He will be 82 at the start of the next term, 86 when it ends. Granted, Joe Biden is officially in good health. He does not drink alcohol, does not smoke, practices physical exercise five days a week.
Son last full health reportpublished by the White House on February 16, notes a series of minor inconveniences, underlines that the president was little affected by the Covid from which he suffered in the summer of 2022 and concludes that “President Biden remains a man of 80 vigorous years, fit to exercise the office of the presidency”.
In fact, this octogenarian with a sometimes frail look, with a gait punctuated by small laborious steps, has taken dozens of hours by plane and train without flinching in barely three days because he wanted this surprise visit, audacious, of an American president in Kiev in order to show the unwavering support of the United States for the Ukraine of Volodymyr Zelensky.
Since the beginning of his mandate, the American president has however given more than one sign of fragility, falling from his bicycle or stumbling while climbing the steps leading to Air Force One. And the blunders he has been accustomed to for a long time also marked his first years in the White House, such as the day in September when he asked “where is Jackie”, then looking in the crowd for a parliamentarian who had died a few weeks earlier.
No opponent available
Politically, the president has also been roughed up by a left wing that has at times found him too moderate in the face of staunch Republican opposition. On infrastructure, for example, Joe Biden had to settle for a plan of 1,200 billion dollars, including 550 billion for new projects, when he was aiming for an amount three times higher.
But then, how to explain that no credible rival comes to dispute the Democratic nomination with this weakened president? That only Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who, apart from his illustrious name and ancestry, has dared to declare himself so far seems to have little to offer beyond a radical “antivax” campaign, or Marianne Williamson, activist and ” spiritual teacher”, already swept away during the primaries of 2020?
The fear of Donald Trump as a driving force
David Axelrod, a former adviser to Barack Obama, now a political analyst for CNN and a professor at the University of Chicago, sees at least three reasons for this absence of a serious threat.
First, the incumbent president still has a considerable political and institutional advantage. He has the prestige of the function, the means to take initiatives, the hand on the apparatus of the party.
Second, Joe Biden has skillfully exploited this last advantage, pushing the Democratic Party to adopt a new primary schedule that is significantly more favorable to him. The Iowa caucus, where Joe Biden finished 4th in 2020, will no longer be the launch event of the primary season.
This favorite status is also decisive financially, as the cost of a presidential campaign in the United States has literally exploded. In total, Joe Biden spent more than $1.6 billion on his 2020 campaign, according to opensecrets.org website. OpenSecrets further notes that total spending on the White House race doubled between 2016 and 2020, to $14.4 billion. What dissuade more than one potential candidate.
Finally, the third factor: the specter of Donald Trump and the fear he continues to inspire in the Democrats encourage them to opt for a safe bet and to rule out the risk of a “new” candidate who will never be subjected to the steamroller of a presidential campaign. However, after a sluggish start to the campaign and despite many legal pans, Donald Trump is now widely favored in the race for the Republican nomination.
By way of conclusion, David Axelrod recalls this maxim, dear to Joe Biden, of another famous American politician of Irish origin, Kevin White, governor of Massachusetts then mayor of Boston from the 60s to the 80s. “Don’t compare me to the Almighty,” he used to say. “Compare me to the alternative”.
