By Glynn Wilson –

Former Vice President Joe Biden, a moderate Democrat who plans to appeal to working-class voters who deserted the Democratic Party to vote for President Donald J. Trump in 2016, tossed his hat into the ring to run for president on Thursday in a YouTube video on his own campaign channel that was shared on Facebook and Twitter instead of announcing his bid in a speech covered by the mainstream media. In spite of recent media controversies about his age, gender, race and his treatment of women, he emerged as the Democratic front runner.

“It’s time for respected leadership on the world stage — and dignified leadership at home,” Biden said, highlighting the confrontation of neo-Nazis and leftist activists in Charlottesville in his campaign video.

“It’s time for equal opportunity, equal rights, and equal justice,” he says. “It’s time for an economy that rewards those who actually do the work. It’s time for a president who will stand up for all of us.”

Biden is expected to make his first public appearance as a candidate on Monday at an event in Pittsburgh featuring union members, a key constituency picked up by Trump in 2016.

Biden come out swinging against Trump in the video, an indication that he will not shy away from drawing a stark contrast between himself and the president from the start of his campaign.

“I believe history will look back on four years of this president and all he embraces as an aberrant moment in time,” Biden says. “But if we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation, who we are, and I cannot stand by and let that happen.”

A white man at the age of 76, Biden has been wrestling with the decision to run for months, knowing his candidacy will face questions about whether he is too old and too centrist for a Democratic Party yearning for fresh faces and increasingly propelled by its more vocal liberal wing. He has already faced questions about how he handled the hearings of Anita Hill back when he was the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and his touchy-feely treatment of other Democratic women on the campaign trail.

New Polls

Yet he begins his campaign as the front runner among Democrats who performs better than any of the other announced candidates against Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, in the election scheduled for November 2020.

A new Morning Consult/Politico poll conducted April 19-21 among 1,992 registered voters found Biden leading the president by 8 percentage points in a hypothetical matchup, 42 percent to 34 percent.

Biden has a significant edge over Trump among women (17 points), millennials (22 points) and independents (10 points).

Along with his advantage over Trump, Biden has held a consistent lead in weekly tracking polls among likely Democratic primary voters. A significant 30 percent of likely voters said the former Senator from Delaware was their top pick, followed by 24 percent who chose Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

In the prominent states holding early nominating contests – Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada – Biden’s lead over Sanders is currently larger, 34 percent to 26 percent.

While Obama’s spokeswoman Katie Hill said in a statement after Biden’s announcement that Obama has long said selecting Biden to be his running mate in 2008 was one of the best decisions he ever made, the statement fell short of a formal endorsement since the former president is not ready to endorse any Democrat this early in the primary race.

Biden apparently believes he can appeal to union members who supported Trump in 2020, a conservative voter base that has tended to vote for Republicans since Ronald Reagan won their support back in the early 1980s on the basis of race and religion, especially in the South.

In a speech to union members in April, Biden called Trump a “tragedy in two acts.”

“This country can’t afford more years of a president looking to settle personal scores,” he said.

Many Democrats are already going after him on Facebook and Twitter, however, saying the party doesn’t need an old, white man as its standard bearer in this day and age.

U.S. Senator Doug Jones

But that didn’t stop U.S. Senator Doug Jones of Alabama from announcing his support of Biden on social media. They have long been friends and Biden came to Alabama and supported his Senate candidacy.

Joe Biden Endorses Doug Jones in Alabama Senate Campaign

“The quality that makes Joe stand out is his ability to bring people together to find common ground while standing up for what he believes is right,” Jones said, the moderate Democrat from Birmingham who knocked off Republican Roy Moore in that special election in 2017. “We need to listen to each other and get things done for working people. Joe can, and will, do that. That’s why I support Joe Biden.”

Many followers on Jones’ personal Twitter feed said “nope” and “ugh” in response.

“I’m glad you are in the Senate instead of Roy Moore,” one follower said. “But for President, we have to do better than Joe Biden.”

“You DINO’s stick together, right Doug?” replied another, using a term bandied about by liberals to mean “Democrats in Name Only,” a catch phrase used to criticize so-called “neo-liberals” and pro-business Democrats.

The quality that makes Joe stand out is his ability to bring people together to find common ground while standing up for what he believes is right. We need to listen to each other & get things done for working people. Joe can, and will, do that. That’s why I support Joe Biden. https://t.co/vxnLQu0XDZ

— Doug Jones (@DougJones) April 25, 2019

Racism and Charlottesville

In his announcement for president, Biden talked about the August 2017 attack at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville as a defining moment for the himself and the country, when one woman counter protester died yet the president refused to condemn the Nazis.

“It was there … we saw (Ku Klux) Klansmen and white supremacists and neo-Nazis come out in the open … bearing the fangs of racism,” Biden said, criticizing Trump’s remarks at the time that there were “very fine people on both sides.”

There was no moral equivalence between racists and those fighting inequality, Biden insisted.

“In that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime,” he says.

“Biden’s candidacy will offer early hints about whether Democrats are more interested in finding a centrist who can win over the white working-class voters who backed Trump in 2016, or someone who can fire up the party’s diverse progressive wing, such as Senators Kamala Harris of California, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, or Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts,” according to coverage by the wire service Reuters. “His long history in the Senate, where Biden was a leading voice on foreign policy, will give liberal activists plenty to criticize.”

He will have to answer for cozy ties to the banking industry, which is prominent in his home state of Delaware, and for his authorship of a 1994 crime act that led to increased incarceration rates, especially for African Americans.

Yet unlike some of the other Democrats who have shied away from taking on Trump directly, Biden has been one of Trump’s most vocal critics.

Last year, he said he would have “beat the hell” out of Trump if the two were in high school because of the way the president has talked about women. That prompted Trump to call him “Crazy Joe Biden” and to claim on Twitter that Biden would “go down fast and hard, crying all the way” if they fought.

Formerly known for occasional verbal gaffes on the campaign trail, Biden failed to gain traction with voters during his previous runs for president in 1988 and 2008, although he was picked as Obama’s running mate and helped him secure victory over the McCain-Palin ticket in 2008.

President Obama is still one of the most popular presidents and public officials in American history, with far more followers on Twitter than Trump, 106 million to 59.9 million.

Links

Joe Biden’s Campaign website

Joe’s Twitter
Joe’s Facebook
Joe’s Instagram

Relevant hashtags.

#JoeBiden #Joe2020 #BidenForPresident