It opens with shots of the January 6 insurrectionist riot that Donald Trump incited by lying about the 2020 election. Then it quickly pivots to footage of demonstrators protesting the Supreme Court’s decision to eviscerate Roe v. Wade and end the constitutional right to an abortion. Next Biden appears and says one word: “Freedom.” He asserts that “personal freedom is fundamental to who we are as Americans.” He notes that “the work” of his first term has been to “fight for our democracy.” As more images of January 6 flash on the screen—and photos of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Trump—Biden points out that “around the country, MAGA extremists are lining up to take on those bedrock freedoms.”
Here's what’s intriguing. Biden did not come out of the chute for 2024 hailing the specific accomplishments of his administration: implementing a nationwide Covid vaccination program, the bipartisan infrastructure bill and CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act and its extensive climate change provisions, the appointment of diverse federal judges, building a global alliance to support Ukraine, and more. Instead, the video focuses on the danger posed to America. Biden slams the GOP for aiming to cut taxes on the wealthy and its assault on Social Security. But the grand theme of this opening campaign message is that Republicans are a threat to liberty and democracy, seeking to curtail women’s freedoms, banning books, and “telling people who can they love, all while making it more difficult for you to be able to vote.”
With assorted images of America appearing—fireworks, flags, workers, children, churchgoers—Biden declares he is still battling for the soul of America and describes this fight as a question of “more freedom or less freedom, more rights or fewer.” As politicians are wont to do, he claims the stakes are high, noting, “Every generation has faced a moment when they have to defend democracy.”
This ad establishes the basic sales pitch for Biden-Harris 2024: MAGA extremism endangers the nation. Biden and his campaign team chose not to list the multiple accomplishments of his first term to present a results-oriented plea for keeping Biden in the White House. (Look at our jobs numbers!) Instead, they set out to establish a larger narrative to shape the contest: The anti-democratic MAGA barbarians are at the gate; they are imperiling basic freedoms, such as reproductive rights and voting rights; and they must be stopped. This is not a kitchen-table-issues approach. It’s about the nation’s political survival.
I hear that the next round of Biden ads will zero in on economic matters and, presumably, celebrate the wins of his first two years in the White House. But this opening blast builds on how he tried to define the midterm elections. Late last summer, Biden delivered a speech that decried MAGA extremism as “semi-fascism.” He noted that Trump has embraced political violence (factcheck: true). A few days later, speaking at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, he proclaimed that “Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”
Given the results of the midterms, with no red wave materializing for the Republicans, Biden and his advisers appear to have concluded that this attack on the GOP—pegging the party as the vehicle of autocratic extremism—was effective and can succeed in 2024. And they are following a strategy utilized by Barack Obama in 2012.
After the Republicans won the House in 2010 in a midterm election Obama described as a “shellacking,” he and his team (which included a guy named Joe Biden) concocted a game plan for the coming presidential contest that was based on Obama’s ability to establish the race as a face-off between two competing visions for the country. After he got through the bruising budget battles of 2011—when Republicans threatened to block the lifting of the debt ceiling and force the US government to default on its bills—Obama delivered a series of speeches in which he contrasted a communal view of America that included economic policies to bolster middle-class families and the social safety net with the GOP approach of tax cuts for the well-to-do and laissez-faire economics. He strived to make the 2012 election a choice between two different stories. (I wrote a book on this: Showdown: The Inside Story of How Obama Battled the GOP to Set Up the 2012 Election.) The Republicans played right into Obama’s hands by nominating Mitt Romney, who was a poster boy for plutocracy. (Even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, while campaigning against Romney for the GOP nomination, slammed him as a “vulture capitalist.”)
It worked out well for Obama. His preseason narrative provided him an advantageous context for the subsequent back-and-forth with Romney. Did America want a progressive-minded president who offered programs to help middle- and low-income Americans? Or did it want a predator businessman who was espousing the latest iteration of help-the-rich, trickle-down economics?
A dozen years later, Biden is trying something similar. Yet he is doing so with a more elemental and perhaps more abstract concept: protecting democracy. Political consultants often advise their clients to concentrate on concrete matters. Tell the voters what programs you will deliver. (A chicken in every pot!) Biden will do that under his new campaign catchphrase: “Let’s finish the job.” Yet it was striking that during his first 2024 at-bat, he swung for a different fence. His target is MAGA radicalism, which extends beyond Trump, who may or may not be the 2024 candidate. (The White House now assumes Trump will be the GOP’s choice.)
This is a bold move—especially for a guy who has long yearned to be a bipartisan dealmaker. But with MAGA Republicans in control of the House and vowing financial chaos with a possible default, Biden is well-positioned to make their radicalism and their support of Trumpish autocracy the central issue of the 2024 campaign. As it generally goes, the party that does not inhabit the White House tries to push the need for change. (We must boot the current occupant to do something about inflation.) And the incumbent party attempts to cast the election as a choice. (Whatever you think about us, we’re better than those other guys.) Biden is going larger, contending that the choice of this moment is the most essential choice of all: democracy or Trumpism. This has the benefit of being an accurate characterization.
There’s a bit of a joke in the political media world: Every election is the most important election of our lifetime. When Biden in 2020 ran on the idea that he was fighting for the soul of the nation, it could seem that was merely a clever bumper-sticker slogan he adopted to attach a certain loftiness to his own political ambition. But it turned out to be true. Trump’s presidency, his attempt to overthrow the constitutional order of the United States, and his incitement of the violent raid on the US Capitol demonstrated that. And now the American experiment is indeed up for grabs. So will Biden’s reprising of this theme coupled with a more dire analysis of the fate of democracy work for him and the Democrats? It’s much too early to offer predictions. But Biden is certainly correct in one regard: Whatever happens in 2024 will certainly tell us much about the soul of America.
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