Biden touts economy, infrastructure; may offer 2024 preview

President Joe Biden hasn’t announced a reelection campaign, but some of the themes likely to be the centerpiece of that expected run should be on display Friday night when he addresses a national Democratic Party meeting.

The president plans to focus on his administration’s accomplishments creating jobs and stimulating domestic manufacturing as he and Vice President Kamala Harris speak at a Democratic National Committee gathering in Philadelphia.

“I would argue the Biden economic plan is working,” Biden said before flying to Philadelphia, reacting to a new jobs report showing that employers created a net 517,000 jobs last month, exceeding economists’ expectations. He called the tally “strikingly good news.”

Prior to their evening speeches, Biden and Harris visited a water treatment plant and celebrated $15 billion in funding to remove lead pipes from service lines around the country, including in Philadelphia. That comes from a bipartisan infrastructure package Congress passed in 2021, 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 top 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.”