How Do Democrats Explain Biden? It’s still awkward for candidates running in 2022. By James Freeman
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-do-democrats-explain-biden-11664219485?mod=opinion_lead_pos11
Last month this column noted the significant number of Democratic candidates hoping that President Joe Biden would exercise his right to remain silent in their congressional districts. Reuters and the Washington Post found various candidates who didn’t want to campaign with the president and a striking number of Democrats have avoided even commenting on the subject.
Since then, the president’s standing in public-opinion surveys has improved somewhat but he remains unpopular. Meanwhile at least one Democratic House candidate seems to have found a clever way to deflect questions about Mr. Biden.
Will Weissert reports today for the Associated Press on Ohio Democrat Greg Landsman. Mr. Weissert writes that Mr. Landsman won’t say if the president will help or hurt his campaign and reports:
[Mr. Landsman] doesn’t think the president will visit the southwest Ohio swing district before the November midterm elections and insists that, in thousands of conversations while campaigning, Biden usually “just doesn’t come up.”
In political conversations during a campaign for federal office, the president of the United States usually goes unmentioned? This sounds like a job for those vaunted fact-checkers that new and old media companies keep telling us they employ.
Mr. Weissert reports on another Ohioan who has perhaps been hearing voter complaints about Mr. Biden a little too often:
Two hundred miles north in Toledo, Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur, the longest-serving woman in House history, has been more direct, producing an ad saying she “doesn’t work for Joe Biden” mere weeks after greeting the president at the Cleveland airport in July.
But avoiding Biden campaign events wasn’t always so popular among Democrats. Way down south from Ohio, current gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke (D., Texas) still seems sore about the places Mr. Biden wouldn’t visit while he was running as the shutdown candidate in 2020. Patrick Svitek quotes Mr. O’Rourke in the Texas Tribune:
“Candidate Biden didn’t spend a dime or a day in the Rio Grande Valley — or really anywhere in Texas, for that matter — once we got down to the homestretch of the general election.”
O’Rourke said Democrats also erred by campaigning remotely during the pandemic while Republicans stumped in person.
Now Republicans are aggressively targeting South Texas, both in the governor’s race and down-ballot contests.
“I am making sure that we do not commit the same sin as some Democrats before me have committed, which is take voters of color — Black voters and Latinos — for granted,” O’Rourke said.
One has to appreciate Mr. O’Rourke’s candor on this issue, but Democratic campaign consultants might prefer that he had opted instead for the full Landsman.
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One recent campaign event where the president not only appeared but was warmly welcomed occurred on Friday in Washington at the headquarters of the National Education Association. It’s not news that the giant teachers union is at the heart of the Democratic coalition. But what is perhaps striking is that the union doesn’t even labor to present itself as something other than partisan and ideological. The gathering was officially described by the White House as a “Democratic National Committee Event” and Mr. Biden’s speech was only occasionally about education as he attacked Republicans and ran through the comprehensive leftist agenda from climate to corporate taxes to abortion.
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