Biden harnesses history for campaign
GETTYSBURG, PA. >> Presidential hopefuls tend to declare every upcoming election the most important one that voters have faced in their lifetime. Joe Biden goes bigger.
The Democratic nominee portrays 2020 as an entanglement of social, economic, political, environmental and public health crises as threatening to America’s stability as the Civil War and the Great Depression. Biden points to the presidents of those times — Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt — for inspiration, even using one of the nation’s most hallowed battlefields, where Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address in 1863, as a backdrop for his closing argument against President Donald Trump.
“A century and a half after Gettysburg, we should consider again what can happen when equal justice is denied and when anger and violence and division are left unchecked,” Biden said in rural Pennsylvania.
He pledged, as president, to “marshal the ingenuity and good will of this nation to turn division into unity and bring us together.” Refashioning Lincoln’s words, Biden added: “It cannot be that here and now, in 2020, that we will allow the government of the people, by the people and for the people to perish from this Earth. It cannot, and it must not.”
The approach, Biden aides say, is more than lofty presidential rhetoric; it’s necessary groundwork for governing. Being a steady alternative to Trump, the ex- reality television star Biden describes as “erratic” and “dangerous,” may be enough to win in November, they argue.
But once in office, Biden would need a clear mandate from a splintered electorate if he hopes to enact the kinds of comprehensive proposals he proposes to control the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout, combat the climate crisis and confront centuries of racial and economic inequities.
“A lot of good work and thinking is going into how to actually tackle the challenges in this moment of crisis that the Trump administration has failed to address and resolve,” Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, a Biden confidant, said in a recent interview.
“It’s simple,” added Coons, who holds the same Senate seat Biden occupied for 36 years. “But it’s complicated.”
A Biden aide who was not authorized to publicly discuss strategy and spoke on condition of anonymity said the campaign is considering at least one more major speech before the Nov. 3 election with the kind of historical sweep and imagery that Biden mustered in Gettysburg.
There are hazards and unknowns in Biden’s approach.
“Tom Dewey,” quipped Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House speaker and Trump ally. He was referring to Republicans’ 1948 presidential nominee, who appeared a sure victor over President Harry S. Truman at a time of domestic uncertainty after World War II.
“Dewey spent a large part of October talking about how great a president he’d be, and Truman spent October taking Dewey apart” on the particulars, Gingrich said of Truman’s comeback victory.