President Joe Biden, who will be 82 years old on Election Day 2024, launched his 2024 reelection campaign on Tuesday.
Summary
President Joe Biden, who will be 82 years old on Election Day 2024, launched his 2024 reelection campaign on Tuesday with a video announcement where he pledged to “finish the job.”
- The 80-year-old Biden opened his ad with images of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and said he was in a “battle for the soul of America.”
- Biden presented himself as a “defender of freedom” in the video, which repeatedly used the words “freedom” and “rights” to intimate that Republicans, who he portrayed as in an “extreme movement” that wants to take away rights, freedoms, overturn elections and ban abortion.
- Should he win, the octogenarian Biden would be 86 by the end of his second term in 2029.
- CNN noted Biden’s announcement came “four years to the day after launching what was then seen as a long-shot effort to fulfill a White House dream first kindled by an unsuccessful race for the 1988 Democratic nomination.”
- NBC News called a possible Biden-Trump general election “the rematch nobody wants.” An NBC News poll released on Sunday found “70 percent of respondents said Biden shouldn’t run, and 60 percent said Trump shouldn’t.”
- The New York Times noted you might have missed Biden’s announcement as he “has no immediate plans to barnstorm the key battlegrounds. Decorative bunting is nowhere to be found, and large rallies will come later.”
- Fox News covered late night host Jimmy Kimmel’s roast of “Grandpa Joe” Biden’s reelection announcement. “Most people his age are barely winning the battle against constipation,” Kimmel said. “But make no mistake, Grandpa Joe is back on the road to the White House and he’s doing 35 in the center lane with his blinker on.”
- National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke predicted Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may prove more of a challenge to Biden’s reelection campaign that most pundits expect at this point in the cycle. Cooke wrote, “The Kennedy scion will never be the Democratic nominee, but he may end up doing a great deal of harm to the president’s fortunes.”
- The New York Post recalled when the octogenarian Biden first ran for Senate in 1972, he bashed his 63-year-old opponent for being too old. Biden’s personal attacks on Sen. Cale Boggs’ age contributed to the then 29-year-old’s victory – but if Boggs was too old at 63, what does that say about a man who will be 82 years old on Election Day 2024?
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© Dominic Moore, 2023
