Biden paves the way for 2024

Joe Biden was barely two minutes into his State of the Union address when he made his first mistake.

He called Senate Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schummer "minority leader."

He hadn't gotten past greetings and the Republicans were rubbing their hands.

Trump wrote on his social network, Truth: "Big misstep."

The Fox chain launched an alert.

Twitter was abuzz.

And yet, that minimal three-letter slip, which Biden also immediately corrected, was the juiciest thing found in a speech lasting more than an hour, who hoped that the lapses of the octogenarian president would show that he is not in a position to run for office. re-election in 2024.

Rather the opposite occurred.

In a scuffle with the Republicans, something unusual for a speech of this type, Biden showed reflexes and irony.

He said, which is true, that some of them are proposing cuts in Social Security and health care and in the face of protests from the opposition and some bawdy reactions—Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Trump congresswoman who mistook gazpacho for Gestapo, stood up and called him a “liar”—the president replied: “I love conversions,” he said, drawing laughter and applause from Democrats.

“As we apparently agree, Social Security and Medicare are already out of the question, right?

We are unanimous!"

Biden has used the State of the Union address as an apparent springboard to his — still theoretically hypothetical — candidacy for re-election in 2024. He insisted that the job had to be “finished,” but what he did was mostly show off the accomplishments the first half of his term.

A few days earlier, at a Democratic National Committee event in Philadelphia, attendees chanted: "Four more years!"

And after the speech he visited Wisconsin, one of the decisive states, and Florida, the territory of both Donald Trump and his likely Republican alternative, Governor Ron DeSantis, in two days.

The president has put together a story in which he presents himself as a defender of citizens against the abuses of banks, oil companies, pharmaceutical companies and other large companies.

He flaunts the record numbers of job creation of the last two years, and in particular of industrial jobs to woo unions.

He presents himself as the guarantor of social security and public health coverage.

He attacks the risk to democracy implied by extreme Trumpism and his electoral denialism.

And, in foreign policy, after the serious setback of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, he has kept the rudder firm in supporting Ukraine and has stood up to China.

Among the achievements of the first half of his term are the infrastructure law, the one to promote the manufacture of microprocessors and his star climate, fiscal and health package with the opportunistic (and misleading) name of the Inflation Reduction Law.

Biden's challenge is for the effect of these measures to be transferred to the citizens.

Price hikes, which eroded his popularity so badly last year, have lost some steam.

The much-vaunted recession does not finish appearing.

And even the migratory flow, another target of the Republican targets, is giving way.

When things seemed to smile at him, the discovery of classified documents from his time as vice president in an old private office and at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, have led to a new setback that Biden downplays.

"As far as I know, the type of things they collected were things from 1974 and lost papers," he said this week in an interview.

“When they packed [things from] my offices to move them, they didn't do the kind of work that should have been done to thoroughly review each piece of documentation,” he added.

Biden has closed the gap between those who disapprove and approve of his management by half, but it is still 11 points.

And, what is worse, when voters and Democratic supporters are asked if they want him to run for re-election, 58% prefer that there be another candidate, according to a recent poll by ABC and the

Other surveys show similar results.

End of the second term with 86 years

The question, of course, would be which other candidate, but an alternative is not intuited.

An incumbent president does not usually have weighty rivals in his party's primaries.

However, the case of Biden, who would assume a second term at 82 and finish it at 86, is unprecedented.

Age has already emerged as a prominent issue in the 2020 campaign. Much attention was paid to the choice of the vice-presidential candidacy, as a potential replacement for 2024. However, the popularity of Kamala Harris is still lower by far than Biden's.

Harris will likely repeat on Biden's ticket.

Other potential candidates have stopped short of taking any steps and have generally shown their support for the president.

The Democratic Party has also redrawed the primary calendar to suit Biden's wishes.

The president's official position is that he plans to run for re-election, but has not made the "decision" yet.

"I'm not ready to do it," he said this week in a television interview.

At the press conference after the legislative elections on November 8, he answered the question in the plural and looking at his wife, Jill Biden: "Our intention is to present ourselves again."

Then he has continued without giving many clues.

In December it was leaked that at the dinner at the White House, on the occasion of the state visit of the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, the two presidents and the first ladies toasted the 2024 campaign (Biden, teetotaler, raised his glass with Coca Cola).

Although the polls are not Biden's friends, his 2020 victory and the result of the legislative elections on November 8 (much better than expected) support him.

Having Trump as the rival candidate would likely increase his chances of winning.

He would have it more difficult against a younger rival, although the president assures that his decision is independent of who is in front of him.

Biden was not a very bright student, but he was already running for class representative in high school.

He has continued to do so in his 50-year political career (as a candidate for senator, vice president and president).

An announcement is expected in the coming weeks/months.

If he decides to run, the second half of his term, with a Republican majority in the House of Representatives and few options to push through big measures, will become a struggle between the president and the opposition.

Biden will try to show off his achievements, while the Republicans will try to harass him with investigations (they have already launched some of them).

This week, Biden was asked about his age again in an interview on PBS: “Look at me.

It is all I can say".

According to the president, the day of his speech he heard people say: "Look at Biden, my God, age is not an issue anymore."

Of course, the president added: “I am a great respecter of destiny.

I would be absolutely honest with the American people if I thought there was any health problem, anything that would prevent me from being able to do the job.

And we'll see.

But I think people have to watch me."

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