WASHINGTON – Barack Obama praises Joe Biden’s empathy in a recently released campaign video, while the alleged Democratic presidential candidate expresses frustration with President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus crisis, saying “it cannot be related in any way “with the struggles of the Americans.
In his first joint in-person appearance of what has become a largely virtual campaign, the former president and vice president sat down earlier this month for what the Biden team calls a “broad” and “socially distant conversation “on the biggest challenges the United States faces, including the pandemic, the economic crisis, and how to tackle systemic racism.
A more comprehensive video will be released on Thursday. But in a preview released Wednesday morning, Biden asks his former running mate if he could imagine standing before the country as president to say, “I am not responsible.”
“Those words didn’t come out of our mouths while we were in office,” says Obama.
“I don’t understand their inability to get an idea of what people are going through,” says Biden. “It just can’t, it can’t relate in any way.”
Obama says it was precisely Biden’s ability to relate to the struggles of Americans today that led him to choose him as his running mate 12 years ago.
“It is the reason I wanted you to be my vice president, and the reason you were so effective,” says Obama. “It all starts with being able to relate. If you can sit down with a family and see your own family in them, and the struggles you have been through or your parents or children have gone through, if you can connect those struggles with someone else’s struggles, then you are going to work hard for them. And that is always what motivated you to enter the public service. “
Biden’s campaign is using the video preview to try to build their digital voting efforts, encouraging supporters to text the campaign to receive notifications when the full video is posted on Obama’s social media channels. and Biden. Biden’s team is similarly encouraging fans to sign up for email and mobile alerts about their choice of a potential running mate, expected in early August.
The video also serves as a foretaste of the friendly convention Democrats are planning next month, one in which most of the action takes place not in one place in Milwaukee but online, with events and speakers airing from the whole country.
“Milwaukee remains the anchor of our convention,” Biden told a Milwaukee television station Tuesday night. But he said it would be a combination of “live and viral” events.
“We are already moving in the direction of making biographical and similar pieces, and exposing what we are going to be running so that many [it] it will be virtual on television … coming from different parts of the country in all probability, “he said.
