The day after President Donald Trump declared himself “your president of law and order,” Democratic rival Joe Biden began a speech by reciting the final …
The day after President Donald Trump declared himself “your president of law and order,” Democratic rival Joe Biden began a speech by reciting the final words of George Floyd, whose death at the hands of police has sparked nationwide protests.
“I can’t breathe,” Biden said this week in Philadelphia as he quoted Floyd, an African American man who died after a white police officer in Minneapolis held a knee on his neck for nearly nine minutes. “I can’t breathe.”
As the White House race was again upended – first by a pandemic and now by the largest display of public demonstrations in a half-century – Trump’s get-tough response opened the door for the former vice president to present a contrast. It’s one the Biden campaign embraced.
And yet it’s a tightrope for Biden politically. Not only has he exposed himself to attacks from Trump as soft amid civil unrest and violence, but many young African-American activists at the center of the Floyd protests still haven’t warmed up to his candidacy.
On Friday, Biden officially clinched the Democratic presidential nomination by passing the 1,991-delegate threshold need to be the party’s nominee.
As he did four years ago, Trump invoked “law and order” language from Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential run, which came during similar national turbulence.
The Biden campaign said the president’s decision to forego a national address calling for healing highlighted a lack of leadership. The campaign has also accused Trump of botching the response to the coronavirus pandemic that has killed nearly 110,000 – a characterization the president rejects. On Friday, Biden blasted Trump for ‘spiking the ball’ on the economy after a Rose Garden event in which the president and his aides extolled an unexpectedly strong May employment report.
“It’s obvious that these two individuals are trying to have very different conversations with voters,” said Amy Dacey, former CEO of the Democratic National Committee, who is now executive director at American University’s Sine Institute of Policy and Politics. She said the protests have further turned the race into a “question of which leadership style people want moving forward.”
After Trump threatened to quell the riots with U. S. military force, Biden leaned into what his campaign perceives as one of the former vice president’s best qualities – empathy – and pushed for police reforms that Trump has stayed away from following the death of Floyd.
In addition to the Philadelphia speech, Biden held a Zoom call with Democratic mayors and visited a gathering at a predominantly black church in Wilmington, Delaware. The campaign planned events where Biden was listening, not just talking.
“Like many of you, I know what it’s like to grieve. I know what it feels like to feel like you can’t go on,” Biden said, decrying widespread “suffering” in the U. S. right now and bringing up the five-year anniversary of the death of his son, Beau, who had battled brain cancer.
“The pain is raw. The pain is real. A president of the United States must be part of the solution, not the problem. But our president today is part of the problem.”
But there are risks with Biden embracing the sentiment of protesters. Trump on Thursday tried to tie Democrats and Biden to activists’ calls to “defund police.” He tweeted, “Remember that when you don’t want crime.”
Although Biden has condemned the violence and looting, senior Trump campaign adviser Katrina Pierson suggested the Democratic candidate had made a “crass political calculation” that the unrest would help his campaign.
“Joe Biden’s campaign made it clear that they stand with the rioters, the people burning businesses in minority communities and causing mayhem, by donating to post bail for those arrested,” she said.
For the Biden campaign, the goal is to connect the president’s response to racism and inequality to the pandemic and economic suffering, arguing it’s another crisis that Trump can’t handle.
