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WASHINGTON (AP) – Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama intensified their attacks on President Donald Trump and defended their time at the White House in a new video showing their first in-person meeting since the outbreak of coronavirus.
The 15-minute video, posted online, was the latest effort to further engage the former president in the 2020 campaign as his former vice president tries to rebuild Obama’s winning coalition. Obama has promised an active role in the campaign this fall.
The former White House associates used an interview-style conversation to amplify Biden’s arguments against Trump, with Obama emphasizing Biden’s personal attributes and experience. They pointed to their administration’s 2010 health care law and blamed Trump for fueling the divide among Americans. They were also highly critical of the Republican president’s efforts to combat the coronavirus, which has killed more than 140,000 Americans.
“Can you imagine standing up when you were president and saying: ‘It is not my responsibility, I am not responsible’?” Biden said, offering a similar line of attack to his recent campaign speeches when he claimed that Trump “gave up” the country and “waved the white flag” in the pandemic.
“Those words didn’t come out of our mouths while we were in office,” Obama replied. Trump hit the couple on Thursday afternoon in a Tweet, accusing them of doing a “terrible job” in office and allowing their choice. The Republican National Committee issued a scathing assessment of “skillfully produced, spotless love feasts,” dubbing the effort as “the fiction of Biden and Obama.”
The two men are shown wearing masks as they arrive at an office, then sit far apart from each other to observe social estrangement for a conversation without a mask. Biden’s campaign called it their first in-person meeting during the pandemic.
Obama compared the nation’s current economic circumstances to what he inherited in 2009 after the financial collapse that unfolded during his general election campaign the previous year.
“We had to move fast, not just 100 days,” said Obama. “We had to move in the first month to pass the recovery law.” Calling Obama “Mr. President,” Biden replied that he would repeat what he learned: “We have to maintain and prevent people from sinking forever.”
The former president largely stayed out of the once-crowded Democratic primaries, but he backed Biden in April, when he was the last standing candidate. Obama organized a virtual fundraiser for his former vice president last month that raised $ 7.6 million, the most of any Biden campaign event so far. He then warned Democrats to become “complacent and conceited.”
In other exchanges, Obama and Biden criticized Trump’s vision of American society, and Obama praised Biden for possessing empathy for what he said Trump lacks.
“He ran deliberately dividing people from the moment he went down that escalator, and I think people are now saying, ‘I don’t want my son to grow up that way,'” Biden said, recalling the launch of the Trump campaign in 2016.
Obama said he has confidence in Biden’s “heart and character”. The government, the former president said, “starts with being able to relate. If you can sit down with a family and see your own family in them … then you are going to work hard for them, and that is always what motivated you.”
Based on this point, Biden discussed the past few months before his son Beau died of brain cancer and linked it to the 2010 health law. Biden said he recalled thinking “what would happen if his insurance company could get in, which They could have done before we passed Obamacare, “and said,” You’ve outgrown your insurance. “
Obama said “I couldn’t be prouder than we did” and alluded to the Trump administration’s continued efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act in Congress and invalidate it in court. “It’s hard to understand someone who wants to take away people’s health care in the midst of a major public health crisis … and a time when unemployment is double-digit,” he said. The Republican National Committee insisted: “President Trump and the Republicans will always protect pre-existing conditions.” However, when the Republican Party controlled Congress for the first two years in Trump’s office, it failed to approve a promised ACA replacement that would preserve the law’s ban on insurers denying coverage based on a person’s medical history. .
The RNC also noted that Obama repeatedly promised in his first term that the new law would allow anyone to keep their existing private coverage. In fact, the minimum coverage standards in the law effectively forced some policyholders to obtain different plans.
Obama remains a failure for Trump and the Republican base, just as it was during his two terms as president. But the two winning coalitions of the 44th president remain the rough model for a Biden victory in November. At the time of the 2016 election, Obama had a Gallup job approval rating of 53%, with 45% disapproval, for a net positive approval rating of 8 percentage points. When he left office a few months later, that net positive rose to 22 percentage points: 59% approve, 37% disapprove. In 2018, when Gallup evaluated the position of past presidents, Obama obtained 63% retrospective approval.
Meanwhile, for Trump, Gallup has measured just three net positive approval ratings during his more than three years in office, all earlier this year, and none of them higher than 4 percentage points.
