Biden announced his candidacy for a second presidential term
With his speech, Biden, as an experienced politician, set the agenda for the future elections of the 2024 cycle. He spoke as a politician who knows how to adopt Republican rhetoric. His performance in the first 20 minutes resembled a classic representative of the “elephant” party. Biden's main task as an incumbent president is to praise his achievements and do this as often as possible. But as a politician who has gone through more than one election campaign, the president sets the scenario for the future election campaign and its content from the very beginning. At this point, it is likely that any other candidate other than Trump would have accommodated this agenda and played second fiddle in the public debate.
Biden very competently crushed positive areas in the economy and took a proto-Republican position on certain issues. For a voter, an alternative Republican candidate with similar theses will look more faded, and a conventional Trump will look more radical. There is another perspective to Biden's speech. Although with a negative reaction from Republicans on the gun reduction agenda, Biden managed to act as a unifier of the political system. After Trump and his two-year attacks on the US electoral and broader political system, the current address was reminiscent of the good old messages to Congress.
And while Biden addressed Congress and the nation, Trump followed the path of Brazilian ex-President Jair Bolsonaro and issued a parallel address. Let me remind you that Bolsonaro, who lost in the second round by a margin of less than 2%, continues to call himself the President of Brazil, and his victorious opponent, Lula da Silva, “chief executive.”
One of the possible scenarios for future elections is a confrontation between the systemic centrist Biden and the radical idealist Trump. In the meantime, the current president is aiming for a productive year of work to complete all his initiatives.
Author: Pavel Dubravsky
