Biden, 76, is set to offer himself as a levelheaded leader for a country wracked by political conflict, a rationale he believes could attract a broad cross-section of voters who want to move on from Trump.
In a 3 1/2-minute video laying out his reasons for running, Biden chose not to talk about policy issues or his biography but instead began by recalling the white supremacist march through Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and a counterprotest, and Trump’s comment that there were “very fine people on both sides.” In that moment, Biden said, “I knew the threat to our nation was unlike any I’d ever seen in my lifetime.”
“We are in the battle for the soul of this nation,” Biden said. “I believe history will look back on four years of this president and all he embraces as an aberrant moment in time. But if we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation, who we are, and I cannot stand by and watch that happen.”
Trump, in a Twitter post about Biden on Thursday morning, did not respond to those remarks but instead lampooned the former vice president as “Sleepy Joe” and derided the Democratic field.
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Biden is seen by many Democrats as a trustee of former President Barack Obama’s legacy, perhaps capable of restoring the consensus-seeking liberalism of Obama’s administration. The former vice president has encouraged that perception, labeling himself to reporters in early April as an “Obama-Biden Democrat” and suggesting that accounts of the left wing’s ascendancy in the party were greatly exaggerated.
In his announcement video, Biden’s opening argument to Democratic voters and the country at large attempted to set him above and apart from his party’s ideological dividing lines and crowded field of candidates. Rather than describe his political record or embrace left-wing policies that some Democrats and liberal activists are hungry for, Biden made a thematic attempt to define the Democratic primary in terms of a question: which candidate can beat Trump and restore normalcy.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.