Roll up for Joe Biden’s fourth run at the White House and his second as President. The pitch is simple: Biden at 80 is the man to stop Donald Trump, 76. Two battles are therefore underway at once — for control of the 2024 White House race and how to win it.
The first is to clarify Republican opposition. The reason Democrats have accepted a superannuated candidate who struggles to inspire is that he has brought a subterranean tussle on the Right to a head. Biden’s nomination forces a hollowed-out Republican party to choose between a “next-generation” Ron de Santis and a re-run of the 2020 Trump versus Biden contest.
Presidential races are endlessly complex and very simple. If Biden forces US conservatives to choose Trump, a man embroiled in more legal cases than several series of TV’s Suits combined, he has the enemy of choice. That is already a small but significant advantage in the martial arts of presidential races.
And yes, his age and blooper-prone appearances are negatives. But the past three years have shown two things: one is that centrist Democrats have governed reasonably well. Barring another spike in US inflation, the country’s economy has performed better than OK and its corporate sector still far outperforms its rivals.
The other point is that the Biden-Kamala Harris partnership has severe weaknesses. One former White House aide wryly describes the three-minute video showing the two wandering companiably together as “the longest talk they’ve had since 2020”. It also deals with a number of challenges in putting together the Democrat ticket — a female running mate of colour who is not in danger of sparking a damaging culture-war from the Left of the party. Conveniently for the incumbent, Harris does not have the heft or spark to be a challenger for power, so that works too.
The question is not whether Biden is the best thinkable candidate, but whether a combination of smart policy work in the past three years and the fragmentation of the American Right provide a roadmap to victory.
The Inflation Reduction Act legislation, the Biden plan for carbon emissions reduction, favours US-based businesses over competitors. It neatly combines climate-change redress with a milder version of the Trumpian demand that jobs should be brought home to the US.
And Biden has been lucky in his timing. The decoupling of the influential Fox TV network from Trump and the embarrassment of the Dominion court case over the network’s ambivalent coverage of the January 6 assault on the Capitol in 2021 make it harder for Trump to amplify his message.
Alternatives may yet turn out to be even nastier — but they will struggle to reach as wide an audience.
The relatively early coronation of the candidate is undoubtedly a risk. But it is also, in Biden’s stubborn way, a gauntlet to his opponents. Either they need to pivot sharply to Florida’s “younger Trump”, de Santis, whose early support has been dropping both in the “beer vote” of blue-collar supporters and the “wine vote” of more prosperous conservatives. Or they push the race into the squares of the political chess board where Biden feels most comfortable — competing with Trump, where he has a track record of victory.
The horrors of January 6 and the pursuit of conspiracy theories since surely power the Trump comeback machine. But they also clarify opposition to it.
There will, however, be many more tensions along the way. Neither the Right or Left flanks in Congress are convinced by the “whatever it takes” approach to the Ukraine conflict and Biden himself is equivocal on the final aims of the war. If Americans tire of a distant conflict with no clear end-state in sight, the risks of it being frozen or fudged heighten.
Allies in Britain and Europe have had to accustom themselves to visits which blend the President’s stolidity (and values of American grit honed in the Cold War) with a limited view of Europe’s interests. The message at home and abroad will be that despite his age, he can beat the grandmaster of chaos and thwart a menacing comeback when the international stakes are high. If he wins that bet, his other shortcomings will seem vastly unimportant. If he loses, America and its allies will have far worse to worry about.
Anne McElvoy is Executive Editor at Politico
