Prof. ST Hsieh
Director, US-China Energy Industry Forum
626-376-7460
April 25, 2023
As expected, President Biden announced today that he is running for reelection in 2024. There is no surprise, incumbent president is expected to run for reelection for the second term as the US law allowed. But there is no excitement either. Of course, Biden is 80 years old, and his age/health is a legitimate concern, but his performance in the White House so far is less than impressive. Domestically, the nation is divided more than ever under his leadership. His argument for his reelection is to protect personal freedom. But he has been the President for two years already, how the people are losing personal freedom? His slogan “let us finish the job” could be cynically turned to “the job as US President will finish him!”
Even more depressing is the almost inevitable scenario of a re-match of Biden vs Trump in 2024. The nightmarish consequence is that Trump could be the US President again in 2025. God Bless America.
Biden announces 2024 reelection bid: ‘Let’s finish this job’
ZEKE MILLER
Mon, April 24, 2023 at 9:00 PM PDT
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden on Tuesday formally announced that he is running for reelection in 2024, asking voters to give him more time to “finish this job” and extend the run of America’s oldest president for another four years.
Biden, who would be 86 at the end of a second term, is betting his first-term legislative achievements and more than 50 years of experience in Washington will count for more than concerns over his age. He faces a smooth path to winning his party’s nomination, with no serious Democratic challengers. But he’s still set for a hard-fought struggle to retain the presidency in a bitterly divided nation.
In his first public appearance Tuesday since the announcement, Biden offered a preview of how he plans to navigate the dual roles of president and presidential candidate, using a speech to building trades union members to highlight his accomplishments and undercut his GOP rivals, while showing voters he remained focused on his day job. Greeted by a raucous crowd of building trades union members — a key base of Democratic support — with “Let’s Go Joe” chants, Biden touted the tens of thousands of construction jobs being created since he took office that are supported by the legislation he signed into law.
“We — you and I — together we’re turning things around and we’re doing it in a big way,” Biden said. “It’s time to finish the job. Finish the job.”
The official announcement, in a three-minute video, comes on the four-year anniversary of when Biden declared for the White House in 2019, promising to heal the “soul of the nation” amid the turbulent presidency of Donald Trump — a goal that has remained elusive.
“I said we are in a battle for the soul of America, and we still are,” Biden said. “The question we are facing is whether in the years ahead we have more freedom or less freedom. More rights or fewer.”
While the prospect of seeking reelection has been a given for most modern presidents, that’s not always been the case for Biden. A notable swath of Democratic voters has indicated they would prefer he not run, in part because of his age — concerns Biden has called “totally legitimate” but ones he did not address head-on in the launch video.
Yet few things have unified Democratic voters like the prospect of Trump returning to power. And Biden’s political standing within his party stabilized after Democrats notched a stronger-than-expected performance in last year’s midterm elections. The president is set to run again on the same themes that buoyed his party last fall, particularly on preserving access to abortion.
“Freedom. Personal freedom is fundamental to who we are as Americans. There’s nothing more important. Nothing more sacred,” Biden said in the launch video, depicting Republican extremists as trying to roll back access to abortion, cut Social Security, limit voting rights and ban books they disagree with. “Around the country, MAGA extremists are lining up to take those bedrock freedoms away.”
Biden also plans to point to his work over the past two years shoring up American alliances, leading a global coalition to support Ukraine’s defenses against Russia’s invasion and returning the U.S. to the Paris climate accord. But public support in the U.S. for Ukraine has softened in recent months, and some voters question the tens of billions of dollars in military and economic assistance flowing to Kyiv.
Still, many Democrats would prefer that Biden didn’t run again. A recent poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows just 47% of Democrats say they want him to seek a second term, up from 37% in February. And Biden’s verbal — and occasional physical — stumbles have become fodder for critics trying to cast him as unfit for office.
Biden, on multiple occasions, has brushed back concerns about his age, saying simply, “Watch me.”
Biden is not expected to dramatically alter his day-to-day schedule as a candidate — at least not immediately — with aides believing his strongest political asset is showing the American people that he is governing.
A second Biden term: 3 big consequences
·Senior Columnist
Tue, April 25, 2023 at 10:10 AM PDT
What could Joe Biden accomplish in a second presidential term that he couldn’t in a first? Quite a lot, actually.
Biden’s April 25 announcement that he’s seeking reelection isn’t likely to generate a lot of excitement among voters. Two-thirds of Americans think Biden shouldn’t run again, and half of those cite his age as the primary reason. Biden is 80 and would be 86 by the time he finished a second term.
Yet Biden was a sleeper candidate in 2020, just as he has been a sleeper president. He electrified virtually nobody in 2020, but beat more than a dozen Democrats plus incumbent Donald Trump to win the White House. His low-key presidency has lacked pizzazz, but still resulted in landmark developments on infrastructure, green-energy investment and domestic manufacturing.
Here are three of the biggest things at stake in Biden’s reelection bid:
Higher taxes. When Republicans passed the tax-cut law that President Trump signed in 2017, they made corporate tax cuts permanent. But tax cuts for individuals, at every income level, expire at the end of 2025. That was necessary to keep the long-term cost of the law below a budgetary threshold it had to meet in order to pass. The hope among Republicans then was that voters would love the tax cuts so much that a future Congress would find a way to extend them.
Green energy everywhere. Biden is already pushing the most ambitious green-energy program in US history, including hundreds of billions of dollars in incentives Congress passed last year, stretch goals to slash tailpipe emissions and promote electric vehicles, and a forthcoming plan to drastically cut carbon pollution at power plants. There’s plenty that could go wrong — and lots of opposition from industries that would face higher costs, lost customers or other types of disruption.
But if Biden wins, a couple of crucial things will happen. First, all the automakers, utility firms, energy drillers and other businesses affected by Biden’s plans will have more certainty about the future.
An answer on student-debt relief. This is another huge legal question: Biden signed an executive order last year forgiving up to $20,000 in student debt per borrower, which opponents promptly challenged in court. The Supreme Court is due to issue a ruling by early summer. Then what?
‘Too much for him’: Russians react to Biden’s 2024 reelection bid
Tue, April 25, 2023 at 12:23 PM PDT
MOSCOW (Reuters) – Muscovites reacted with indifference to U.S. President Joe Biden’s announcement on Tuesday that he would seek reelection in 2024, with some questioning whether he was too old for the bid.