Biden close to campaign mode

No announcement yet as president touts success at meeting

President

Joe Biden hasn’t yet announced a re-election 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 Kamala 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.”

“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.

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.