President Joe Biden on Monday opened the fall campaign season with a series of pointed warnings aimed at contrasting the continuing danger to US democracy from former president Donald Trump and his “Maga Republican” supporters with the Democratic Party’s more optimistic vision for America.
The president arrived at the Henry Maier Festival Park in Milwaukee, Wisconsin for a speech the White House had billed as a celebration of the US Labor Day holiday and “the dignity of American workers” and spent enough time glad-handing supporters who’d queued up for photographs to put him roughly an hour behind schedule when he took to the iconic blue lectern adorned with the presidential seal.
Mr Biden opened his remarks by noting that Labor Day was a “special day” for the US, and said he would not be there to speak as the sitting President of the United States without the support of unions representing “electricians, iron workers, letter carriers, Teamsters, labourers, bricklayers, transit workers, plumbers and pipefitters — steel workers”.
“I wouldn't be here without cops, firefighters, teachers, nurses. I wouldn't be here without painters, pilots, auto workers, custodians, carpenters, grocery store workers, steel metal workers,” he said, just before he recalled how as a 29-year-old county supervisor, he mounted a successful campaign for the Delaware Senate seat he would hold for three decades and defeated a longtime incumbent with the backing of organised labour.
“The bad news for you all is I’m here because of you,” he quipped.
With the jokes out of the way, Mr Biden turned to more sobering subject matter: the “inflection point in American history” he has spoken of since he launched his ultimately-successful 2020 presidential campaign.
“We're gonna have to ask whether we want to be a country that moves forward ... if we're gonna build a future ... obsess about the past,” he said.
In an echo of last week’s prime-time speech on “the soul of the nation,” Mr Biden said the US has come out stronger from every crisis it has faced because it has optimistic as a nation, not one of the “division and violence and hatred” he attributed to “some others”.
Yet the president appeared to temper his previous warning about “Maga Republicans” by stressing that “not every Republican” subscribes to the ideology favoured by his predecessor and those who support him and recalling how he’d been able to work with “mainstream Republicans” throughout his long career in politics.
But Mr Biden said the “extreme Maga Republicans” in the House and Senate have made the choice “to go backwards” by acting “full of anger, violence, hate and division” and called for the audience of union members to “choose a different path forward”.
“We have to a future of unity, of hope, of optimism — we're going to choose to build a better America,” he said.
Turning to his administration’s record, Mr Biden acknowledged the “hard few years” the US has gone through on account of the Covid-19 pandemic. But he said the US has “come a long way” since he took office, citing the fact that the coronavirus “no longer controls our lives and the record number of Americans participating in the labour force.
“It didn’t just happen — we never gave up, we never gave in, and we are delivering for working and middle class Americans now,” said Mr Biden, adding that his administration has seen 10 million new jobs added to the US economy with wages rising and the unemployment rate lower than it has been in a half-century because of the American Rescue Plan, the Covid relief package he signed into law at the outset of his presidency after not a single Republican voted for it in either the House or Senate.
He also pointed out to the union workers in attendance that that Covid package had included a separate bill that will keep multi-employer union pensions which members had “worked so damn hard for” from going bankrupt. He called that legislation “one of the most significant achievements forenoon workers and retirees in over 50 years”.
“Not a single Republican congressman voted to protect your pensions,” he said.
Continuing, Mr Biden warned that the same “extreme Maga” Republicans who didn’t support shoring up union pensions will also be “coming for your Social Security as well,” citing a plan from the National Republican Senatorial Committee that would sunset all legislation after five years.
He contrasted Democrats’ “vision of a fairer, more decent America” with the “extreme Maga” comfort with violence as evidenced by the Republican embrace of January 6 rioters as “patriots”.
“Have you seen the videos what happened that day? Listen to the story of both parties in Congress and the jeopardy they were put in. Cops attacked and assaulted, speared with flagpoles, sprayed with mace, stomped down and dragged — brutalised,” he said.
“Police lost their lives as a result of that day, and the Maga Republicans ... say it was a ‘peaceful protest?’ You can’t be pro-insurrection and pro-democracy. You can't say support law enforcement and call the people who attacked on January 6 patriots”.
Mr Biden called the pro-Trump riot which was aimed at stopping certification of his 2020 election win “an attack on American democracy and all we stand for”.
“This is why ... those of you in this country — Democrats ... and mainstream Republicans, independents ... have to be stronger and more determined and more committed to saving American democracy than the Maga Republicans,” he said.
Following his stop in Wisconsin, Mr Biden headed to a United Steelworkers union hall West Mifflin, just outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to speak with union members.
“Wall Street didn’t build America. The middle class built America, and unions built the middle class,” Mr Biden said at the event, at which he described himself as a “union guy.”
Mr Biden was joined at the event by John Fetterman, a Democratic candidate for US Senate, in Pennsylvania.
