By WILL WEISSERT and CHRIS MEGERIAN
Associated Press
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — President Joe Biden hasn’t yet announced a reelection campaign, but he sounded like someone already running while firing up a national meeting of the Democratic Party on Friday.
“No matter who is president, things are going to change radically in the next 15 years,” Biden said at a reception for the Democratic National Committee during its meeting in downtown Philadelphia. “And the question is, Are we going to be leading the pack? Or are we going to be the end of it?”
Biden and Vice President Harris came to the party gathering to tout what they called their administration’s successes — including growing the economy and overseeing major public works and health care and green technology spending packages approved by Congress.
They got good news even before arriving: a strong jobs report released hours earlier showed employers created a net 517,000 jobs last month, exceeding economists’ expectations, which Biden called ”strikingly good news,” saying
“I’m not saying we’ve done everything right. I’m gonna make more mistakes over the next period of time. But we’ve got the right attitude,” said Biden, who said he wanted to reverse a trend of too many Americans having lost faith in their country’s ability to do great things.
Harris was even more direct, telling those gathered: “It’s not the time to pat ourselves on the back. “It’s the time to see it through.”
“And that’s going to take as much work, if not more, than everything that everyone here put into where we are today,” the vice president said.
Prior to heading to the party meeting , Biden and Harris visited a water treatment plant and hailed $15 billion in funding to remove lead pipes from service lines around the country, including in Philadelphia. That comes from a bipartisan infrastructure package, which is also bankrolling railway projects the president spent this week trumpeting.
“The issue has to do with basic dignity,” Biden said. “No amount of lead in water is safe. None.”
With the State of the Union address coming next week, Biden has renewed calls for political unity, something he’s acknowledged being unable to achieve despite his promises to do so as a candidate in 2020. But those appeals haven’t tempered Biden’s broadsides against his predecessor, Donald Trump, and the Republican Party’s continued fealty to the former president’s “Make America Great Again” movement.
“Look, this is not your father’s Republican Party,” the president said this week at a separate DNC fundraiser in New York. “This is a different breed of cat.”
The president is facing increasing pressure in Washington, where a special counsel is investigating how classified documents turned up in his home and a former office, and a Republican-controlled House is investigating everything from the administration’s immigration procedures at the U.S.-Mexico border to the overseas ties of the president’s son Hunter.
That’s made some Democrats anxious to see Biden stay on the political offensive.
“The president is trying to solve the problems of the nation on infrastructure, on microchips, on gun safety, on health care, and I think he’s going to talk about doing that,” said Randi Weingarten, a DNC member and president of the American Federation of Teachers. “And then also compare (that) to the GOP, which seems to be on a revenge agenda.”
Biden’s speech comes the day before the DNC is set to approve an overhauled presidential primary calendar starting next year that would replace Iowa with South Carolina in the leadoff spot. New Hampshire and Nevada would go second, followed by Georgia and Michigan — a change the president has championed to ensure that voters of color have more influence deciding the party’s White House nominee.
The new calendar would be largely moot if Biden runs again, since party elders won’t want to oversee a drawn-out primary against him. The president is addressing the Democrats as the party has been solidly unified in its opposition to the new Republican-controlled House and with no major Democratic challenger thought to be preparing to run against him.
Biden’s expected announcement of a reelection campaign is still likely weeks away. But his advisers have been preparing for one for months, making staffing arrangements and readying lines of political attacks against Republicans seen as early presidential front-runners, including Trump, who launched his campaign in November, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Alan Clendenin, a DNC member from Florida, said Biden has strengthened the economy, reestablished U.S. global standing and promoted inclusive values — the opposite of what Trump and DeSantis stand for.
“They predicted gloom and doom. He’s proved them all wrong,” said Clendenin, who kicked off a DNC Southern caucus meeting by noting that Florida has begun lagging behind other states in key policy areas and joking of its governor, “That’s what happened when you’re led by the devil.”
Biden repeatedly denounced “extreme MAGA Republicans” as a threat to the nation’s democracy in the runup to last fall’s midterm elections, when his party pulled off a stronger-than-expected showing. The president has since worked to portray today’s GOP as beholden as ever to Trump, saying at the New York fundraiser, “You’d think that what would happen is that there would be a little bit, as we Catholics say, (of) an epiphany.”
“Well, instead, it’s been the exact opposite,” Biden said. “They’ve just doubled down.”
Biden will have a harder time campaigning on future legislative accomplishments now that the GOP controls the House. A coming fight over extending the nation’s legal debt ceiling may only harden partisan clashes.
Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said he and the White House would continue talking about ways to avoid a debt limit crisis. But, referring to federal spending, McCarthy said, “The current path we’re on we cannot sustain.”
Biden has also suggested that simply bashing Republicans won’t be enough, however, noting that Democrats have seen their support among Americans without a college degree decline. He said Friday night that his party “stopped talking to” blue-collar workers.
“We have to get working-class people to say we see them,” the president added.
Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
