US election 2024: Biden banks on attack as the best form of defence

Now, barring some unforeseen intervention or circumstance, that face-off seems a given following Donald Trump’s sweep of the Super Tuesday contest last week, when he won more than a dozen state primaries forcing his sole remaining Republican opponent, Nikki Haley, to suspend her  nomination campaign.

And so the scene is set for eight months of political combat that marks the  first time since 1912 that a former president, Trump, has challenged a sitting one, Joe Biden. 

As The Washington Post reminded a few days ago, President Biden’s campaign aides have always maintained that once the race came down to these two runners, their electoral prospects would improve as American voters were faced with the stark threat of another Trump term.

Certainly Biden last week appeared determined to utilise that fear by delivering a battling campaign-style State of the Union address that somewhat broke with tradition.

Attacking Trump – albeit never by name – he painted a vision of the kind of America he seeks, one that stands in marked contrast to the “ancient ideas” of “hate, anger, revenge, retribution”, that Biden argued are the key driving forces of his “predecessor”.

In all, it was a high-stakes moment for Biden and an address full of fighting talk – the speech even compelling one congressman in its aftermath to quip to Biden: “You had the Irish fire tonight!”

So is this pugnacious style what we can expect from the Biden campaign over the coming months until the election on November 5? Could it be that Team Biden has decided that the old maxim of “attack being the best form of defence” is the strategy that will keep their man in the White House? 

To date, both Biden and Trump (below) have cast the coming election as an existential moment for America. But until Biden’s State of the Union speech, many US Democrats were getting edgy, sensing that Trump and the Republicans might be getting far too easy a ride, enabling them to land political punches on a Biden campaign that seemed simply content to soak them up.

Some polls only helped underline Democrat concerns. According to the political website realclearpolitics.com in terms of polling average for example, Biden trails Trump by 1.8 percentage points in a head-to-head match-up nationally, while his approval rating is languishing below 40%.  “The bad news is if the election were held today, he’d lose,” Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist who advised former president Bill Clinton was cited by the Financial Times as admitting. “The  good news is that it is not being held for 243 days.”

It’s hardly surprising then that you could almost hear the collective sigh of relief among Democrats last week as “Sleepy Joe” – as Trump derisorily calls Biden – appeared to wake up from any perceived slumber and launch into  the offensive.

But while Biden’s ebullient speech was warmly received by Democrats, it still couldn’t disguise the fact that with eight months to go, his approval ratings are still at the lowest levels of his presidency.  In short, Biden’s capacity to pull off a second consecutive term is anything  but certain.

Biden might however take certain comfort from the response to his speech among some of America’s top political commentators.

On a scale of one to 10, The New York Times’ (NYT) senior columnists rated Biden’s speech at around an average of eight. Among the best moments for some was the president’s focus on women’s power and the contentious issues of abortion rights that will feature high in the election. 

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“In a speech with multiple fire-breathing moments, I was struck by Biden’s level tone as he declared that those who fought to overturn Roe v Wade were going to learn about ‘the power of women’,” observed the NYT’s lead writer on business and economics  Binyamin Appelbaum.  His view was shared by op-ed columnist Michelle Goldberg, who also thought that a key moment came when Biden, “looked right at the Supreme Court justices and, quoting Samuel Alito about women’s political power from his opinion overturning Roe, said, ‘You’re about to realise just how much’”.

Also on the plus side for Biden were some of his comments on US economic and labour issues. Columnist and international affairs writer Megan K Stack said she “felt huge relief when Biden suddenly spat out three distinct demands: Pass the Equality Act! Pass the PRO Act! Raise the minimum wage!”

On the minus side, however, other columnists like Jamelle Bouie sensed that Biden didn’t have “a good answer for younger and more progressive Democrats on American support for Israel’s war in Gaza, and felt that the president’s attempt to provide one “fell flat”.

But while these largely positive views of some US newspaper columnists are one thing, it’s how Biden’s speech went down with the American people, those who will vote for or against him or still haven’t made up their minds between him and Trump in November’s ballot that  really matters.

Here perhaps Biden has more to worry about, and those Democrats who thought that his speech was a game-changer might be forced to think again. As The Washington Post wryly summed it up: “It’s not clear the American public saw the home run that they did”.

Biden’s campaign team and some media outlets were quick to point out that a post-speech instant CNN poll showed that 65% of viewers offered a positive review of the speech and that viewers also shifted 17 points toward believing America is headed in the right direction – from 45% before the speech to 62% afterwards.

But as The Washington Post reminded, State of the Union speeches almost always receive strongly favourable views, in part because viewership tends to draw disproportionately from the speaker’s allies.

Some observers also note that the 65% who had a positive view of the speech was actually lower than any such speech CNN has polled in the past quarter-century – the previous low being Donald Trump’s 2018 address (70%). 

The caveat to this, however, adds The Washington Post, comes from two factors. The first is that viewers were less aligned with the president than your average State of the Union audience – potentially because we’re in a campaign year, or because questions about Biden’s ability to perform, drew in more people who were sceptical of him particularly with regard to his age and physical capacity to continue in office. 

All this aside though, experienced watchers of American politics and presidential election campaigns, will always caution as to how much can be read into whether a State of the Union address can lift a president’s fortunes.  The historical record certainly suggests a resounding no, and at best it might only give polling a bump if any at all.

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But in the main, Democrats will take heart generally from how Biden’s performance went down, which brings us back to whether what we are witnessing is a much more assertive campaign strategy. 

It was certainly noticeable how many of Biden’s aides seemed keen to underscore that point stressing that what we saw is what we will get more of as Biden’s campaign gains momentum.  In other words, the strengths we can expect him to play to will be defending democracy from an authoritarian rival at home, defending reproductive rights such as abortion and ensuring that certain federal safety net programmes become a priority.

Overseas, meanwhile, it means defending Ukraine against Russia. 

On that latter issue of America’s support for Kyiv, in a hopeful sign for aid to Ukraine that is now stalled in Congress, it was noticeable that while Biden was giving his speech, House speaker Mike Johnson, seated over the president’s left shoulder, nodded sombrely as Biden warned of the political threat posed by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.

“If anybody in this room thinks Putin (below) will stop with Ukraine, I assure you he will not,” said Biden. He then went on to invoke Ronald Reagan’s demand that the leader of the Soviet Union tear down the Berlin Wall, adroitly drawing applause from Republicans even as he rounded on his first calling out of Trump: “Now my predecessor, a former Republican president, tells Putin, quote, do whatever the hell you want!”

Many election watchers believe that in the run-up to November’s poll, we can expect to see more of Biden sounding the theme of the combined domestic and foreign threat posed by Trump.  “If the United States walks away, it will put Ukraine at risk. Europe is at risk.

The free world will be at risk, emboldening others to what they wish to do us harm,” he said.  “History is watching. Just like history watched three years ago on January 6, when insurrectionists stormed this very Capitol and placed a dagger to the throat of American democracy.”

But if the war in Ukraine and Trump’s apparent cosiness with Putin might provide Team Biden with political ammunition, that other thorny foreign policy issue of Gaza could instead cost their election campaign dearly. 

For while the war in Ukraine is  dragging on longer than Biden hoped, his backing for Israel’s war in Gaza has turned into a real political problem for him in several swing states.

The most serious is in Michigan – a crucial battleground state in November, where more than 100,000 people this month voted “uncommitted” on their Democratic ballot papers rather than for the president.

Even in Washington last Thursday as he gave his address, that  problem was evident with protesters  blocking Pennsylvania Avenue forcing Biden’s motorcade to leave the White  House late and take an alternate route to  the Capitol. 

His handling of Gaza not only presents Biden with a backlash on the left – and was why some Democratic lawmakers were wearing Palestinian keffiyehs in the chamber on Thursday – but is influencing Arab-Americans who, as the Democratic primaries revealed, are more than willing to express their anger with the president at the ballot box.

There are other vulnerabilities too for Biden’s campaign, notably the touch-paper issue of immigration – of which his Republican rival Trump never tires of reminding Americans. Most Americans say the situation at the US-Mexico border is at least very serious, including nearly half – according to numerous polls – who call it a crisis. 

This perhaps more than any other issue is where Biden’s strategy will need to up its game to counter the damage done  by Trump’s constant sniping as the  election nears.

Which brings us to the economy. If presidential elections hinge on the “economy-stupid” principle, then winning a second term should be something of a shoo-in for Biden given the success of his economic policies in creating a robust labour market, strengthening household finances, and improving confidence among consumers and businesses. 

But Biden’s poll numbers display the opposite – largely because the pain of high inflation is impacting and recent consumer optimism has not translated in real terms into polling credit for this election campaign.

“Voters are gilding the lily about Trump,” said Matt Bennett, a former Clinton aide and co-founder of Third Way, a centre-left think tank. “They are forgetting all of the things that were terrible about Trump the first time, and they are remembering that the economy was doing pretty good before the pandemic … Trump benefits enormously from people’s faulty memory about that period,” he told the Financial Times.

And so there you have it, Biden last Thursday in his pugnacious State of the Union speech provided a badly needed injection of energy and dynamism into his election campaign.

If, as some political pundits suggest, this is the Biden we can expect to see more of and the issues he focused on represent the core thrust of his campaign, then it’s off to a positive start.  But by any standards, this is shaping up to be an incredibly close race in which a clash of worldviews lie at the epicentre. 

While there’s no doubt that attack is often the best form of defence when it comes to doing political combat with Trump, he himself is adept at such tactics and on that level presents a formidable political adversary.

For now, Team Biden are happy that their man has thrust himself forcefully into the contest. But taking the crucial and advantageous political high ground necessary for victory is some way off yet.