The 79-year-old Democrat, still unpopular despite rising polls, often repeats, “Don’t compare me to Almighty God, compare me to the alternative.” A way of saying that its shortcomings would be nothing compared to the dangers linked to the camp opposite.
This camp is that of his predecessor and his most staunch supporters, whom Joe Biden attacked Thursday evening with rare virulence.
In Philadelphia (east), he proclaimed: “Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans (“Make America Great Again”, the billionaire’s emblematic slogan) represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic”. Representatives of the radical right “feed on chaos. They do not live in the light of truth, but in the shadow of lies”.
The president, however, assured Friday that he was not targeting all of Donald Trump’s voters, more than 74 million people in 2020.
“I don’t view every Trump supporter as a threat to democracy,” he told a group of reporters at the White House. “The people who voted for Donald Trump and support him today, they didn’t vote to attack the Capitol. They didn’t vote to overturn the election.”
On Friday, the New York Times offers this analysis: “If you ask Americans if they support Mr. Biden, they are likely to say no. If you ask them if they support him against Mr. Trump, they cannot say Yes. At least that’s the White House theory.”
Which White House had a heavy hand on the staging: speech at the foot of the building where the American Constitution was adopted, games of blood-red light and deep shadow, and two soldiers in full dress frozen behind the “Commander in Chief “.
Some commentators wondered Friday, and not just those on conservative channels, about this use by Joe Biden of the attributes of the presidency for an openly “political” speech.
One of the White House spokesmen, Andrew Bates, replied on Twitter that “these well-founded warnings are anything but political”.
By hammering home themes like defending democracy and abortion rights, Joe Biden is depriving Republicans of their favorite campaign arguments on the economy and crime.
The conservative camp has criticized rhetoric that it says stirs up divisions, and tried to bring the debate back to these issues.
Some Trumpists have decided to overbid, such as parliamentarian Marjorie Tayor Greene who broadcast a manipulated video to make Joe Biden look like Adolf Hitler.
For Wendy Schiller-Kalunian, a political scientist at Brown University, the Democrats’ strategy is not without risk.
The November midterms will decide if they lose both chambers of Congress (Senate and House of Representatives), if they save at least the Senate, or if they defy all odds by keeping both.
“The key groups in this election are Republican sympathizers in residential suburbs, and independent voters,” who lean more readily to the right, she said. “If Biden makes everything revolve around Trump (…) it can backfire and encourage this electorate to vote” Republican, warns the professor of public and international affairs.
Samuel Goldman, professor of political science at George Washington University, believes that “undecided voters decide on concrete subjects like the economy” and that Joe Biden’s priority is rather to “galvanize Democratic sympathizers.”
The Democrat faces the same dilemma as all American presidents: being both head of state and leader of a party.
“Because of the ideological polarization, the fragmentation of the media and the decline of confidence in the institutions, it is more and more difficult to play both roles at the same time”, analyzes the political scientist.
