Joe Biden No Longer Has the Luxury of Just Running Against Trump
After a bruising at the hands of Kamala Harris, Biden is confronting the reality of a long fight ahead.
(Bloomberg) -- Joe Biden made his bid for the Democratic nomination almost exclusively about running against President Donald Trump. But after a bruising at the hands of Kamala Harris, he’s confronting the reality that there’s a long fight ahead to become the party’s nominee.
The former vice president’s perch at the top of polls was shaken by Harris, the first-term senator from California, who confronted him at the first Democratic debate about past statements on school desegregation. That put the front-runner on the defensive and opened door for some of his party rivals to take aim at his vulnerabilities and his record, even as he tries to keep his focus on Trump.
“It was always hubris to think you could ignore a field that includes this kind of progressive talent, not to mention the historic and unprecedented diversity,” said Jess McIntosh, a Democratic consultant and former aide to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign who’s not affiliated with any of the current candidates.
Biden’s campaign team is reminding allies that there are many more debates ahead, and that he has plenty of time to deliver in the seven months before the Iowa caucus. Still, some supporters are uneasy.
One dedicated donor, who asked not to be identified, said that while Biden remains the candidate best suited to take on Trump, he didn’t have a great debate performance and should have been prepared to face more questions about statements made and positions taken during decades in the public eye.
Harris, 54, who cited her experience being bused to desegregate a public school in California, only briefly addressed the confrontation when asked about it as she campaigned Sunday in her home state.
“It may make people uncomfortable to speak the truth about the history of our country,” she said in San Francisco. “We should recommit ourselves to also agreeing that these things should never happen again. And that was the purpose of me bringing it up on that stage.”
Harris plans to build on her momentum by discussing her personal story more often in the coming weeks and months, said a person close to her. The positive response to her debate comments about her childhood, as a black girl who benefited from desegregation busing, has convinced Harris that voters need to know her story, the person said.
Support Doubles
Harris’s support doubled after Thursday’s debate, according to a Morning Consult survey. Some 12% of Democratic primary voters named her their first choice for president, up from 6% in a poll taken June 17-23.
“It’s about how do you cut through to get to the American people,” Harris’s press secretary, Ian Sams, said on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” on Sunday. “When she talked about being that little girl and we showed people who that little girl was and we showed the human impacts of the policies that were passed in D.C. when she was growing up, that’s immediately translatable to now.”
A significant factor in Biden’s lead in the nomination race has been support from black voters, a crucial Democratic constituency. Harris, who is black, also hit Biden for talking about working decades ago with the late segregationist senators James O. Eastland and Herman Talmadge.
It was clear that Biden felt the sting of Harris’s jab at the debate. At his sole public event since the debate, a conference of the civil rights group Rainbow PUSH Coalition in Chicago, Biden said Harris had pushed a “mischaracterization” of his record and that “the 30- or 60-seconds of a campaign debate exchange cannot do justice to a lifetime commitment to civil rights.”
‘My Passion’
During fundraising appearances over the weekend in San Francisco and Seattle, Biden discussed the importance of civil rights in his career, from inspiring him to run for office five decades ago to deciding to campaign for the 2020 Democratic nomination after Trump’s divisive response to the August 2017 white supremacist march on Charlottesville, Virginia. “That has been my passion,” he said at one of the fundraisers.
He also reverted to a message of unity, giving examples of working with Republicans to pass government stimulus spending during the Great Recession to highlight the importance of working across the aisle.
“The ability to persuade, matters,” Biden said, speaking at the home of former Microsoft Corp. President Jon Shirley. “We can put the country together, and when we’re together there’s not a damn thing we can’t do.”
A Democrat close to Biden’s campaign acknowledged that the debate would prompt the candidate to regroup and look for ways to strengthen his delivery on the stump, just as every other campaign would recalibrate based on what worked and what didn’t.
Show Leadership
Jon Cooper, a New York-based donor who led a group that tried to draft Biden to run in 2016, said he thought Biden might benefit from giving a speech on civil rights in the coming weeks, “an opportunity to put his leadership on full display.”
“Candidates have always given speeches to highlight the strengths of what the media and their opponents believe to be their political weaknesses,” Cooper said. “It might make sense for Joe to face this issue head on,” he added, just as Barack Obama did with his “A More Perfect Union” speech on race in March 2008.
Biden’s closest competitors in the polls, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, declined several opportunities to pile as they campaigned over the weekend, maintaining what has been a truce among the Democratic candidates to avoid negative campaigning and keep the party unified.
Up to Task?
A Sanders campaign aide said the Vermont senator thinks he does better sticking to his policy ideas rather than attacking other candidates. “They’re friends of mine, and you’re never going to hear me disparage them,” Sanders said of the other contenders at an event in Rochester, New Hampshire.
But some of the candidates who’ve struggled to gain traction in the large Democratic field kept up pressure on the front-runner.
The next president must be “someone who can talk openly and honestly about race with vulnerability, because none of us are perfect, but really call this country to common ground, to reconciliation,” Cory Booker said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet The Press” program. “I’m not sure if Vice President Biden is up to that task.”
Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro said on the same program that Biden, 76, would “have to continue to explain” his past position against busing as a tool to achieve racial balance in schools. “We’ve had very painful history in this country of trying to desegregate communities,” Castro said.
--With assistance from Laura Litvan, Spencer Soper and Kim Chipman.
To contact the reporters on this story: Jennifer Epstein in San Francisco at jepstein32@bloomberg.net;Sahil Kapur in Washington at skapur39@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Wayne at awayne3@bloomberg.net, Joe Sobczyk, Ros Krasny
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