Using an online “launch video” early Thursday morning, former Vice President Joe Biden — a longtime Washington insider who served two terms under former President Barack Obama — officially declared his candidacy for the White House in 2020, after weeks of speculation and mystery about whether he’d actually do it or not.
“There’s going to be a ton of people who give [campaign donations] to Joe,” declared Robert Wolf, former economic adviser to Obama, on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” on Thursday, stressing Biden’s name recognition as an asset among an overflowing field of candidates.
Biden, 76, enters the race nearly 32 years after he announced his very first campaign for president.
This new campaign is Biden’s third for the presidency; he previously tried in both 1988 and 2008.
“The core values of this nation, our standing in the world, our very democracy, everything that has made America — America — is at stake. That’s why today I’m announcing my candidacy for president of the United States,” Biden tweeted early Thursday.
In his launch video, the former senator from Delaware mentioned the 2017 clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, at a large white nationalist rally — and suggested he had big problems with President Donald Trump’s statement at the time that “there were some very fine people on both sides.”
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“With those words, the president of the United assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it,” Biden said.
“And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had seen in my lifetime. I wrote at the time that we’re in [a] ‘battle for the soul of this nation.’ Well, that’s even more true today. We are in the battle for the soul of this nation.”
Biden declared that “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.”
“Biden has been running for president & losing since the ‘80s . . . Biden’s fingerprints are all over foreign policy blunders & the weakest economic recovery since WWII. Just ask Pres. Obama, who isn’t even endorsing his right-hand man.” —@michael_ahrens https://t.co/Qj48cCIpwK
— Arthur Schwartz (@ArthurSchwartz) April 25, 2019
On Thursday night, Biden is expected to hold a major fundraiser in Philadelphia.
He’s then scheduled to appear in Pittsburgh on Monday.
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