Biden Seeks to Keep Presidential Air as He Picks Away at Warren
Biden Seeks to Keep Presidential Air as He Picks Away at Warren
(Bloomberg) -- Joe Biden isn’t giving up his front-runner mantle without a fight, refusing to acknowledge that Elizabeth Warren has met him at the top of the 2020 Democratic field and moving to take her on directly on the campaign trail.
Her rise -- she now meets or surpasses him in key state and national polls -- has raised questions about whether he can still campaign as the only candidate who can beat President Donald Trump.
While insisting the No. 1 slot is still his, his tactics have shifted, beginning in Tuesday’s Democratic debate. He called Warren “ridiculous” in her refusal to spell out how she’d pay for the $30 trillion Medicare for All program and suggested she is a foreign-policy novice for calling for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from the Middle East.
He is leaning heavily into appearing presidential. His events are designed more for the Rose Garden than for an Iowa community center, with a schedule heavy on formal speeches targeting President Donald Trump and fundraisers on the coasts. His remarks include frequent mentions of former President Barack Obama and hours spent in the White House Situation Room.
And he refuses to acknowledge that, by some markers, Warren has caught up or passed him in the Democratic race, something that the other candidates made clear by singling her out for attacks during Tuesday’s debate in Westerville, Ohio, and on the campaign trail since then.
“I haven’t seen any polling showing that nationally on average that anybody else is a front-runner,” he told reporters this week despite a number of polls showing just that.
In all, Biden’s approach to Warren’s climb has been to intensify his efforts to look and sound like a statesman, resisting any forces that might suggest he won’t be facing Trump in the general election. At the same time, Trump has given him plenty of fodder, from his accusations of corruption by the Biden family to his abrupt withdrawal of troops from Syria, which speaks to Biden’s foreign policy expertise.
But even as Biden projected indifference about Warren’s gains, he’s also shown signs of feeling the heat as he tries to chip away at her “I have a plan” candidacy and to suggest as he did during the debate that Warren isn’t being “straightforward” on a range of issues, including taxes and fundraising.
As Warren was quietly rising in the polls through the summer, Biden’s attacks on Medicare for All were aimed at Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris while leaving out Warren, who studiously kept her distance.
His tactics shifted this week. He has repeatedly attacked her for her refusal to explain how she’d pay for Medicare for All, a plan she adopted from Sanders, calling her explanations “vague” and not “straightforward.”
“I don’t want to pick on Elizabeth Warren but this is ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous,” he said after the debate.
Biden is also highlighting his foreign policy credentials. He spent decades on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, rising to chairman, a position that helped him become Obama’s running mate.
He jabbed Warren, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee but has little other foreign policy experience, for her call to withdraw all American armed forces from the Middle East.
“I have never heard anyone say, with any serious background in foreign policy, that we pull all troops out of the Middle East,” Biden said Wednesday. Although the foreign policy speech he gave later that day in Iowa was targeted at Trump, it was also a signal to voters that Warren has spent her career on financial issues and can’t claim the same kind of extensive foreign policy experience that he possesses.
And on Friday, he took a swipe at Warren again, announcing endorsements from 51 political leaders in her home state of Massachusetts.
His Iowa speech was the third in a recent wave focused on Trump. Last week in New Hampshire, he delivered a formal address calling for the president’s impeachment and the week before in Reno, Nevada, he stood up to Trump’s discredited claims that his son Hunter’s work in Ukraine was corrupt.
All three speeches drew praise from pundits and a bit more national media attention than his typical campaign stops. Yet while he met voters after each speech, his recent trips to early-voting states have been light on the local issues and retail politics that some voters in those places expect.
Biden’s critics say he has no choice but tout his claims to electability and to challenge Warren and -- where their positions align -- Sanders.
“He appeared to have a campaign that was focused almost exclusively on this issue of electability. I think there are people who now, viewing the field, are having second thoughts about that narrative,” said Jeff Weaver, a senior adviser to Sanders. “And so he has to have some other approach to try to win votes and I think what he is trying to do is attack the progressive agenda which is now ascendant in the Democratic Party.”
“When your core strength is name recognition, there’s not much to say to bring people back to your side,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which backs Warren. “If he falls out of front-runner status, there’s no ideological argument that you can really say to win them back.”
There are warning signs coming from Biden headquarters in Philadelphia. His campaign ended the third quarter with $8.98 million cash on hand, according to filings made this week, and his spending exceeded the $15.7 million he raised during the same period. The Sanders, Warren, Harris and Pete Buttigieg campaigns all ended the quarter with more than $10 million in the bank.
The Biden campaign said it’s focused on planning for a long primary season and has made investments that will pay off once voting begins.
“We’ve always said we think that this race is going to be a dogfight, that it’s going to go long. We are building an operation that is going to be sustained, that we think we’re going to be able to communicate with the voters that we need to communicate with,” deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield said. “So we are 100% confident that we have what we need to run our race.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Jennifer Epstein in Washington at jepstein32@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, John Harney
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