Obama, Biden Reunion Fundraisers Raise $11 Million
Barack Obama and Joe Biden reunited Tuesday for their first joint appearances of the 2020 presidential campaign.
(Bloomberg) -- Barack Obama and Joe Biden reunited Tuesday for their first joint appearances of the 2020 presidential campaign, hosting virtual fundraisers that the Biden campaign said brought in $11 million.
About $7.6 million was raised at an event with 175,000 grassroots donors. A smaller, more expensive event raised about $3.4 million, the campaign said.
It’s the first time the former president has raised money for Biden and just his second public appearance on his former vice president’s behalf. He released an endorsement video in April after Biden’s opponents dropped out of the Democratic primary race.
“We can’t be complacent or smug or sense that somehow it’s so obvious that this president hasn’t done a good job because, look, he won once,” Obama said of successor Donald Trump’s victory nearly four years ago.
“Whatever you’ve done so far is not enough,” he added. He implored viewers at the grassroots event who’d contributed as little as just a few dollars to give more money, spend time volunteering and talk to the people around them about voting for Biden because “nothing has more power than the power of relationships.”
Biden pledged that, if elected, he would “protect and build on everything we achieved in the Obama administration.”
The fundraisers’s haul is the largest of Biden’s presidential effort thus far, surpassing the $6 million that he and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren raised at an event last week.
Trump’s campaign said it, the Republican National Committee and associated joint fundraising groups brought in $10 million over the weekend around his rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the crowd filled just a third of an arena.
Obama compared the current period to the circumstances he faced in 2008 and 2009, during the financial crisis and recession.
“As much of a slog as it was to yank the economy out of the crisis that it was in and in some ways things were tougher in terms of the financial system than they are today, but there was still a sense of a shared American idea that we could build on,” he said.
The Trump White House, he said, “has not just differed in terms of policy but has gone at the very foundations of who we are and who we should be, that suggests that facts don’t matter.”
‘Sense of Urgency’
Obama also criticized Trump for “a militarized response to peaceful demonstrators” in the protests that have swept the U.S. after the death in Minneapolis police custody of George Floyd, an African-American man.
Yet the former president added that the protests gave him hope. “That sense of urgency is the thing that is making me optimistic and it is joined with the fact that we have someone who was with me every step of the way,” he said. “There is nobody I trust more to heal the country and get it back on track than Joe Biden.”
Obama got in a jab at Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. “Poor Dr. Fauci,” he said of Anthony Fauci, who’s led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, “who’s having to testify and then see his advice flouted by the person he’s working for.”
Biden struggled to raise money during much of the Democratic primary season but has begun attracting small and large donors since becoming the party’s nominee. Fundraising surged in May, when his campaign, the Democratic National Committee and allied fundraising vehicles took in $80.8 million, a record for Biden’s campaign, which beat the $74 million that Trump and the Republican National Committee raised last month.
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