President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden soared out of Los Angeles on Sunday, Dec. 10, heading back to Washington, D.C. after three days of celebrity-studded fund-raising events, most of them in private homes in posh Southland neighborhoods.
In scattered speeches across the Southland, Biden appeared to affirm the campaign track that many Democratic pundits believe to be a major piece of his reelection strategy – shine the spotlight on the man who aims to forge a presidential rematch in November, former President Donald Trump.
During a Friday night gala in Holmby Hills – one of at least a half-dozen weekend events that raised millions of dollars amid A-list entertainers, show-business moguls and high-profile financiers – Biden spent about as much time taking swipes at GOP front-runner Trump as he did touting his own record.
“You’re the reason,” Biden told the crowd — co-hosted by such folks as former L.A. mayoral candidate and entrepreneur Rick Caruso and former Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco — “that Donald Trump is a former president, or he hates when I say it, a defeated president.”
Rhetoric swapped between the two political foes has grown increasingly bitter in the past few days, with Trump declaring Biden as “the destroyer of American democracy” last week. At Friday’s event, Biden declared: “The greatest threat Trump poses is to our democracy, because if we lost that, we lose everything.”
Trump said Tuesday in Iowa: “(Biden has) been weaponizing government against his political opponents like a Third World political tyrant.”
Biden took his turn at Friday night’s find-raiser: “The other day (Trump) said, ‘He would be a dictator only one day. Thank God. Only one day.”
Jill Biden, who campaigned in tandem with her husband in L.A. as well as individually, also took aim at Trump.
“I wish that this election were about simple policy differences,” she said during an appearance at Cedars Sinai Medical Center on Friday. “I wish it were about differences of character or merit. But fundamentally, what this election will be about is democracy,” she said.
Pundits say Biden is trying to focus the campaign on Trump’s comments and policy proposals, sometimes more than his own. It’s a time-worn strategy of White House incumbents to try to negatively define their rivals in the public’s eyes. In 2012, Obama and his allies did it with Republican Mitt Romney, a former Massachusetts governor and current Utah senator. In 2004, President George W. Bush was successful against Democratic nominee John Kerry, then a Massachusetts senator.
But Trump, so confident of securing his party’s nomination that he has skipped all the GOP debates, is already better defined than perhaps any figure in U.S. politics. And even as Trump’s promises to seek retribution and references to his enemies as “vermin” animate many Democrats, Biden faces low approval ratings and questions about his age and his handling of the economy and foreign affairs.
Some prominent Democrats have suggested that there’s a danger in making the race too much about Trump. Pollsters give Trump a wide lead over all other GOP foes and some polls show the former president with a slight lead over Biden with 11 months before next year’s general election.
“You can’t really run a playbook for the last election, or what worked previously,” said Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist who was Romney’s 2012 senior adviser and spokesman. “I think Trump is an entirely different, nonlinear opponent compared to an Obama vs. Romney.”
Some prominent Democrats have suggested that there’s a danger in making the race too much about Trump. They say Biden should play up parts of his own record and focus on abortion rights after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Abortion was an issue credited with helping the party exceed expectations in last year’s midterms and several races this year.
After spending much of his presidency declining to refer to Trump by name, Biden has stepped up his warnings about his predecessor. Biden’s campaign has in recent weeks blasted Trump’s suggestions that he wouldn’t rule as a dictator “other than Day 1,” that he would again pursue a repeal of Obama’s health care overhaul, and that he would stage massive raids to try to deport millions of people.
Biden recently told a crowd of donors in Massachusetts, “We’ve got to get it done. Not because of me.”
“If Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running,” Biden said. “We cannot let him win.”
Trump’s campaign did not respond to messages seeking comment. Biden’s campaign says defining clear contrasts between the president and Trump is key to its strategy.
“Next year’s election will be a choice between President Biden’s proven track record of lowering costs and delivering for middle-class families, and Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans’ bleak vision of dividing us,” Biden campaign spokesman Ammar Moussa said, referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement. “We’re going to do the work to ensure voters understand the enormous stakes of next year’s election.”
Obama’s 2012 campaign relied heavily on grassroots organizing and television ad spending to motivate voters. Biden, though, is working to prioritize unconventional ways to reach voters in line with significant shifts in Americans’ media consumption habits, particularly about political issues.
The dynamics of the 2024 race are also different from 2012. Biden has a record of legislative accomplishments on popular issues such as infrastructure. In 2012, Americans were sharply divided over Obama’s signature accomplishment, the health care law often called “Obamacare,” though it is now viewed more positively.
Biden’s aides also point to low unemployment and other signs of economic strength, although polls show Americans don’t feel the economy is strong and they rate Biden poorly on the issue.
Obama campaign veterans hold key roles in Biden’s political operation, from White House senior adviser Anita Dunn, who worked in the Obama White House, to current Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez, a former Obama campaign volunteer and administration official.
Chavez Rodriguez recently sent a fundraising email meant to reassure supporters worried about Biden’s reelection chances, urging them to take a “quick walk down memory lane.”
The email reminded potential voters that many Democrats 12 years ago questioned whether President Barack Obama would win a second term. Biden was Obama’s vice president.
“Flash forward to November 6, 2012. I think you may remember the day,” she wrote. Underneath was a photo of the Obamas and Bidens celebrating their election victory.
Another, Kate Bedingfield, who was deputy campaign manager for Biden’s 2020 campaign and then White House communications director, said presidents always want to “make the campaign about their opponent and not their own record.” That is because governing means making compromises that can be sometimes harder to communicate in ways that resonate with voters, she said.
“They want to shift the dynamics of the race to be about the threat that their opponent poses,” Bedingfield said. “For the Biden campaign, in Donald Trump they have an almost existential threat.”
Obama built his winning campaign around attacking Romney months before Romney was formally the GOP nominee and defining him as a corporate raider willing to slash jobs to boost profits.
In 2004, Bush won reelection despite the growing unpopularity of the war in Iraq by portraying Kerry as a flip-flopper while pro-Bush groups ran a series of ads raising questions about Kerry’s record as a swift boat commander in Vietnam.
Biden has kept a relatively light schedule of campaign rallies, holding just one in the first four months after launching his reelection campaign. He has held dozens of private fundraisers and spent the past week raising money in Boston, Washington, and L.A.
Obama didn’t hold his first reelection campaign rally until May 2012.
One of the most memorable pro-Obama ads featured an Indiana plant worker who described being asked to help build a stage from which the plant’s employees were told they were being laid off. The plant worker blamed Romney and his private investment firm for making more than $100 million by shutting down the plant, a claim that the fact-checking site Politifact rated “mostly false.”
Efforts to vilify Romney only intensified when video emerged of him saying 47% of people would vote for Obama because they were “dependent upon government” and “believe that they are victims.”
Biden’s team has similarly picked up on economic themes to slam Trump, including promoting the story of electronics giant Foxconn. Trump promised as president that the company was building a major plant that would create thousands of jobs in the critical swing state of Wisconsin. Those jobs never materialized.
A year before the 2012 election, however, polls suggested Romney’s public image could be shaped by negative ads in a way that Trump’s cannot.
A Quinnipiac University poll conducted in late 2011 found voters were somewhat more likely to have a favorable than an unfavorable opinion of Romney, 36% to 31%. Notably, another 31% said they hadn’t heard enough about Romney to have an opinion.
A recent Quinnipiac poll found 42% of registered voters said they had a favorable opinion of Trump and 55% had an unfavorable opinion. The same poll found only 37% having a favorable opinion of Biden while 59% had a unfavorable opinion.
Bedingfield agreed that many voters have already made up their minds about Trump. But she said Biden was able to use Trump’s well-defined political brand against him in 2020 and could do the same next year.
Stuart Stevens, who was Romney’s chief strategist, said that the country is now far more polarized than in 2012 and that the focus on Biden’s low polling numbers “is in the framework of a pre-Trump era.”
“I think we’re really in a very different world,” Stevens said, adding that 2024 “is inevitably going to be more of a referendum on Trump.”
Associated Press reporter Will Weissert, pool reporter S.V. Dáte of HuffPost, Southern California News Group staff writer Kristy Hutchings and City News Service contributed to this report.
Source: Orange County Register
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