In the first few moments of the unscripted portion of President Joe Biden’s press conference this week, he referred to his running mate as “Vice President Trump.” That gaffe, on the heels of his referring to Ukrainian President Zelensky as “President Putin” earlier in the day, became the immediate headline of—and takeaway from—the anxiously anticipated presser, an event that was supposed to clarify the president’s shaky standing and embattled reelection effort.
Many people likely didn’t stick around past that mix-up. But those who rode out the entire hour may have noticed something far more interesting: At the presser, the president delivered an unequivocally and forcefully progressive message, pushing a vision of left-leaning policies that have been scarcely mentioned by the White House in the past few months.
This was no prizewinning oratory. The president’s speech was sometimes garbled and halting. Biden has long had a penchant for maundering. He’s bad with names and worse with statistics. He frequently relies on the word anyway to get him out of grammatical cul-de-sacs and rescue runaway trains of thought. He is still old, and he seems meaningfully older than he did last year.
But beyond the style, the substance of the speech was quite notable. Biden hammered corporate greed repeatedly, calling out ballooning corporate profits as a major part of the inflationary economic environment, which he pledged to crack down on in a second term. He made constant mention of the middle and working classes and laid out his vision for governing in their interest. He harped on the rich paying more taxes.
After that, Biden introduced a newish policy of capping rent increases, a program that was news even to close watchers. Of course, in traditional Biden fashion, the delivery was somewhat jumbled, and it’s not entirely clear whether he was announcing a new policy altogether or endorsing a very modest, already existing proposal to limit rent hikes. I recommend this thread, from Washington Post economics reporter Jeff Stein, which gets to some of the confusion on this policy, but Biden’s willingness to go after corporate landlords is also somewhat new and represents an acknowledgment that housing costs remain the most infuriating part of a Biden economy that is otherwise firing on all cylinders.
Later on in the speech, Biden made specific mention of the need for industrial policy, a major component of his administration to this point. His willingness to cast aside free-trade policy, which has dominated the neoliberal wing of the Democratic and Republican parties for decades, is also consequential, as it has become a target for Republicans in the J.D. Vance wing of the GOP, who claim they are going to use the policy to benefit American workers and bring working-class voters to their side.
Biden laid claim to that mantle unequivocally—no doubt drawing groans from Vance and his pals. But that is something that you wouldn’t have expected to hear from Democrats a handful of years ago; under the Obama administration, free-trade orthodoxy was above questioning.
Biden even introduced some measured critiques of Israel, which also came as a surprise. For 10 months now Biden has “bear-hugged” Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, who has routinely undercut and embarrassed Biden in turn, criticizing him publicly and stomping all over the few limitations the administration put in place.
But Biden reflected at the press conference that the far-right Israeli Cabinet had been intransigent, admitted that the government had thwarted badly needed humanitarian aid in Gaza, and noted that Israel was not acting as a ready partner in the quest for a two-state solution. He compared an Israeli occupation of Gaza to American adventurism in Afghanistan during the war on terror, a conflict he termed a terrible “mistake.” He pledged that he would not send the Israelis 2,000-pound bombs, because the civilian casualty rate was far too high in a densely populated area like Gaza.
For many, this is too little too late; famine rages in Gaza, and the medical publication the Lancet recently estimated that the death toll could already be an incomprehensible 186,000 Gazans.
But for a president who has been one of the most conservative and unstinting supporters of Israel anywhere in the Democratic Party, for a president who served as the senator of Delaware, the most corporate state in the union, for a president who was jokingly referred to as “the senator from MBNA” for his fealty to the credit card industry, this speech was shockingly populist. Talking about class, going after landlords and corporate profiteering, condemning imperial militarism—they said you get more conservative as you get older, but here was Biden, deep into old age, sounding as if he’d been brushing up on Marx and Mao.
All in all, it was a far cry from what the White House has been projecting for the past nine months. Biden has broken his public silence rarely—and sometimes frustratingly, like when he spoke out to denigrate college protesters. One of the biggest policy pushes out of the White House centered on a crackdown on the right to asylum that immigration and civil liberties groups have found abhorrent and probably unconstitutional.
For Republicans forecasting a political realignment around a conservative vision of limited militarism, industrial policy, and pro-worker commitments, Biden’s speech was a punch to the gut. It harked back to his 2022 State of the Union, in which he was aggressive with his policy vision and combative toward his Republican detractors.
Will it be enough to save his campaign, which seems to be circling the drain? His gaffes were not insignificant. Most Americans already think he’s too old, and one forceful and sometimes-muddled enunciation of vision isn’t enough to change that. After the presser finished, House Intel Ranking Member Jim Himes, a Democrat from Connecticut, called on Biden to step aside immediately.
But if nothing else, it highlighted how far Biden has come as a politician in his many decades in Washington and how far he has moved the party left during his time as president. That effort has often been jumbled; it also seems clear that there must be a better messenger than Biden to carry that forward. But the vision itself is clear—and it’s easy to imagine what might have been different if Biden had been hammering it in public, imperfectly but adamantly, this whole year. Whether or not Thursday’s presser was a turning point for or a closing statement on Biden’s political career, it was certainly a departure from his debate stage showing. Whether it was strong enough to keep him in the race, and whether that’s good for Democrats, is another question entirely.
