The former vice president tells supporters that he would bridge gaps.
PHILADELPHIA — Former vice president Joe Biden offered himself to voters as a leader uniquely positioned to unify a divided country during a rally Saturday afternoon. The event, the largest of his nascent campaign, was intended to bookend the opening phase of his White House bid.
“We’re all in this together,” Biden told the crowd. “We need to remember that today, I think, more than any time in my career.”
He added a note of optimism: “In this great experiment of equality and opportunity and decency, we haven’t lived up — but we’ve never given up on it.”
Biden walked onstage with his signature swagger, wearing a pair of aviator sunglasses that he shed, along with a sport coat, before speaking to an audience of about 6,000, according to an estimate from a security firm hired by the campaign.
Biden took repeated and direct aim at President Trump, comparing his tactics to those used by dictators. At one point, he quoted Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, delivered during the Civil War on a Pennsylvania battlefield, to drive home the importance of uniting the country.
“Will we be the ones to let the government of, by, and for the people perish from the face of the earth?” Biden asked. “Dare we let that happen? Dare we let that happen? Absolutely not. We will not.”
Biden entered the race three weeks ago with a video that spotlighted Trump’s reaction to the violent 2017 “United the Right” rally in Charlottesville, where white supremacists marched and clashed with protesters.
The president said at the time there were “very fine people on both sides” of the conflict, which prompted Biden to pen an opinion piece in the Atlantic titled “We Are Living Through a Battle for the Soul of This Nation.” The former vice president has made restoring the nation’s soul a theme of his campaign.
Biden followed that video with a rally at a Pittsburgh union hall, where he focused on another theme: Rebuilding the middle class.
