Biden, Obama reunite for unfinished business in Pennsylvania
PHILADELPHIA >> History’s burdens and lessons, its disappointments and its achievements, alighted on Pennsylvania this weekend as the two pivotal figures of the 21st-century Democratic Party joined hands with the next generation of party leaders to try to hold back the deluge.
President Biden and former president Barack Obama have spent 14 years as the twin guardians of their party’s coalition, each drawing on the other’s strengths to balance his weaknesses.
Biden brought to Obama’s campaigns and presidency decades of experience that the dynamic political upstart did not have — and a connection to White working-class Democrats that Obama needed in 2008. Twelve years later, Obama brought to Biden the energy of his eloquence, the youthful appeal of ironic detachment and reinforcement among Black voters who were key to Biden’s victory over Donald Trump.
Now, Biden finds himself confronting an onslaught from Republicans similar to the fury Obama faced in the 2010 midterm elections: a potentially unforgiving electorate focused far more on new problems, especially inflation, than on those Biden was elected to solve: unemployment and the pandemic.
Obama got no credit with
2010’s midterm voters for preventing economic collapse, a real possibility at the time, and now Biden is getting little love for mass vaccinations, millions of new jobs, big investments in infrastructure and technology, and an unemployment rate that in most other times would be the envy of incumbents.
Before thousands of raucous supporters on Saturday afternoon on the Temple University campus, Biden delivered an especially fiery defense of his record and Obama made clear he knows what his old ally is going through. “I can tell you from experience that midterms matter, a lot,” he said, drawing appreciative laughter from those in the crowd old enough to remember Democratic shellackings in 2010 and 2014, the latter marked by especially low turnout.
Both men begged, coaxed and pleaded with Democrats, especially young ones, to turn out on Tuesday to defend democracy itself by voting for this state’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Attorney General Josh Shapiro, and U.S. Senate candidate, Lt.
Gov. John Fetterman.
Pennsylvania’s two hopefuls are another oddly matched pair, and their political circumstances are dramatically different. Shapiro seems on the verge of a big victory over his Republican opponent, Doug Mastriano, a radical-right Trumpist election denier who has become anathema to the moderate swing voters in Philly’s collar counties who often decide elections here.
Shapiro is a button-down-looking guy who makes quite a contrast with Fetterman’s hoodie and shorts or sweats look. But Shapiro displays passion on the stump, and he made good use of his moment of national attention Saturday with a driving riff on his opponent’s — and by extension the GOP’s — misunderstanding of what “freedom” means. It quickly went viral.
Fetterman is on the bubble in a tight contest with Republican Mehmet Oz, the TV elixir salesman trying to run simultaneously as a loyal Trump supporter and a moderate. Since it’s not clear what, if anything, Oz believes, it’s not hard for him to go both ways. “We need more balance and less extremism in Washington,” Oz says in one of his ads, even as he joined Trump and Mastriano at his own Saturday rally.
The contradiction was too delicious for Fetterman to ignore. “A true exercise in moderation,” he said with deadpan sarcasm of the company Oz was keeping. He drove the point home with a contrast to his own gathering: “We are 100 percent sedition-free.”
Felled by a stroke just days before he won his primary, Fetterman turned in a feisty performance. The fact that he’s still ahead of Oz in at least some surveys after a debate in which the effects of the stroke were painfully obvious encourages his backers to make resilience a calling card. “There’s no quit in John Fetterman,” Biden declared.
Fetterman’s biggest challenges will be securing a large enough turnout in Democratic Philadelphia — the point of the rally — and getting enough moderate Republican-leaning voters who already back Shapiro to break with their party twice, which often proves difficult.
Pennsylvania embodies both the good news and bad news for Democrats this year. The party is closing with a shot at key governorships and finds itself in much closer Senate and House contests than it faced in either of the Obama midterms. The numbers suggest Democrats could hold the Senate and contain their House losses. But it would not take much for most of the tight races to fall the GOP’s way.
The larger frustration is that in the campaigns they ran together, Obama and Biden pointed toward the possibility of bringing together a durable Democratic coalition — of Black voters, Latinos, metro-area moderates and progressives, and a significant share of the White working class. That coalition suffered repeated setbacks and was shattered in 2016. No matter what happens on Tuesday, it remains an audacious but unfulfilled hope.