Biden gets boost before address to Democrats
President Joe Biden hasn’t announced a reelection campaign, but some of the themes likely to be the centerpiece of that expected run were to be on display Friday night during an address to a national Democratic Party meeting.
The president planned to focus on his administration’s accomplishments creating jobs and stimulating domes
tic 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 show- ing 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, includ- ing 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 Wash- ington, where a special coun- sel is investigating how clas- sified documents turned up in his home and a former office, and a Republican-con- trolled House is investigating everything from the admin- istration’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.”
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 r uns again, since party elders won’t want to oversee a drawn-out primary against him. The president is addressing the Democrats as the party has been solidly unified in its opposition to the new Republican-controlled House and with no major Democratic challenger thought to be preparing to run against him.