Amid age worries, campaign shifts strategy and lets Biden be himself
WASHINGTON » He is wearing aviators and baseball caps. He is making visits to ice cream parlors and barbecue joints, and asking to meet with influencers who can disseminate images of him on TikTok and Instagram. He is talking more often to reporters and fielding questions on the Middle East, Republicans and, of course, his age.
None of this is a coincidence. As President Joe Biden faces what polls show is significant concern about his 81 years, and a tight election against his likely opponent, Donald Trump, the White House strategy is to have him step out of his protective bubble and directly take on voters' worries.
The issue became supercharged last month when Biden angrily defended himself against a special counsel report that described him as a “wellmeaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
The president quickly became a favorite punchline of late-night talk show hosts, enraging his allies, who acknowledge that although Biden can't turn back the clock, he can at least try to reset how voters view him.
“I have been saying for several months to the campaign, `Please, let him be Joe Biden,' and so have many others,” Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., a close ally of the president, said in an interview.
“It is not only good for the campaign. It is good for him and it's good for the country when Joe Biden gets a chance to get out from behind the podium and be less President Joe Biden and more Joe.”
To that end, Biden is expected to frame the age issue to his advantage in highlighting his legislative accomplishments in his State of the Union address on Thursday night. The point he will make, aides say, is that his achievements as president might have eluded less experienced politicians.
Part of the White House strategy, which has been building since the beginning of the year, is to focus Biden's trips outside Washington more on social media and one-on-one experiences with voters. The White House started inviting local residents and content creators this year to meet Biden at campaign stops, where the president will often take a few moments to introduce himself.
Some of Biden's top advisers, including Rob Flaherty, a deputy campaign manager, and Anita Dunn, who oversees Biden's communications strategy, believe that social media influencers and locals the president meets on his visits have the ability to introduce Biden to a younger, more diverse audience that would not otherwise be familiar with him. (When Biden visited a family in North Carolina in January, a TikTok made of the visit by one of his hosts racked up 4 million views, according to metrics shared by the Biden campaign.)
In an interview, Flaherty said Biden often sends a flurry of requests to aides working on digital media for the campaign. Last week, when Trump compared himself to Alexei Navalny, the deceased Russian opposition leader, the president asked his aides to give him an iPad and had them post a video on TikTok of him reacting to Trump's comment.
“That came from his brain,” Flaherty said.
The president sometimes rewrites tweets to his liking and ad-libs his own video responses, Flaherty said. “He's got more demands than I am sometimes prepared to keep up with.”
The official position of the White House is that moving the president out of his bubble has less to do with voters' concerns about his age and more to do with getting him in front of people in an election year. “We have always known that the most effective way to reach the American people is when they can hear President Biden make his case directly and authentically,” Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement Tuesday.
Biden's close allies say that whatever the official pronouncements may be, it is critical that the president show that he is up for the task of campaigning and for a second term, starting with his Thursday speech.