The day that Joe Biden released a short video announcing his intention to run for re-election, Fox News fired network star Tucker Carlson, CNN fired long-time commentator Don Lemon, and the rape trial of Donald Trump began in New York City.
Those three events saturated the news cycle, leaving Biden’s announcement as just another story. And why not? Everyone knew Biden was going to run. What Biden had to say in his announcement wasn’t particularly newsworthy.
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“I go back to the first election, where he presented himself as… someone who is steady, someone who is thoughtful, someone who keeps his eyes on the prize,” said Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.), one of the Biden campaign’s co-chairs. It is not, she added, about “the antics of the moment.”
Indeed, Biden is once again going to present himself as the “adult in the room.” For most of the 2020 campaign, Biden was content with giving Donald Trump the stage — a gift that Trump accepted without question. Biden didn’t have to define Trump because his friends in the media were doing it for him.
Now, Biden is seeking to define the entire Republican Party as the media defines Trump; extremist, dangerous, ignorant, and willing to take away all of our rights like the right to get an abortion up to and after birth, the right to declare what gender you are, and the right to educate small children about inappropriate subjects.
Biden world has long scoffed at the notion that they should gear their approach around the whims of cable or Twitter at that. And the campaign’s strategy with its launch day, which also featured Vice President Kamala Harris speaking about reproductive rights at an event in Maryland, appeared to reflect a broader awareness about how Americans consume their news now. With the initial video push, followed by two events featuring Biden and Harris that could practically be turned into videos themselves, the campaign will be able to reach a number of constituencies with multiple messages. Creating banner headlines on cable TV, it seems, was not the point.
“We’re living in an incredibly fractured media environment, and so the president and his team have to think about how do we reach people where they’re actually getting their news,” said Biden’s former communications director Kate Bedingfield. That will include Biden’s preference to “engage with content creators with large followings or to package the president’s comments themselves for distribution via social media platforms and email lists.”
This shows how much the information universe has changed in just four years. And if Republicans don’t pay heed to these changes, they’re likely to be left behind as they were in 2008 when Barack Obama’s innovative and revolutionary online fundraising efforts brought in more than $1 billion.
But all the money in the world won’t be able to hide Biden’s decline.
With polls showing a majority of Americans preferring that Biden not seek a second term, the campaign team has its work cut out for them. The task being to gin up support from your own base while keeping yourself off of center stage can, at times, be in conflict. But there is one way to do both: focusing attention on the Republican alternative.
Biden will once again get an assist from the media who will consider it their duty to destroy Donald Trump. There will be no pretense of fairness or balance. Just hard-edged hysterical partisanship.
Trump will have a big hill to climb to defeat an incumbent president.
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