President Biden’s campaign finally moves into gear…..

Time does a piuece with a look at warnings to Joe Biden by his last boss Barack Obama about getting a second term as President…..

Biden is NOT Obama…

He cannot drive the public like the 43 President did….

And he has a LOT more to wrestle with than Obama ever had…

Obama urged Biden to start his campaign….

Donald Trump, screw-up, legal problems and all was actually slightly ahead of Biden , who Obam knew was doing a good job as President, which wasn’t enough for Biden ‘s polls and state’s he needed to beat Trump AGAIN……

 

As this dog has pointed out again and AGAIN here….

Joe Biden needs to become MORE VISIBLE….

The pnademic is over….

He needs to appear before crowds….

He needs to spend the TON of ad money he has accumulated to counter the daily free media Trump gets screwing up….

And Joe Biden, The President needs to do this NOW….

Oh, a Middle East settlement would also help his poll numbers ….

 

Last June, Barack Obama slipped into the White House to deliver a warning to Joe Biden. The state of Biden’s re-election campaign was shaky, Obama told him over a private lunch, according to a Democrat briefed about the meeting. Defeating Donald Trump would be harder in 2024. The mood of the country was sour. Persuading unhappy voters was going to be difficult. Biden needed to move more aggressively to make the race a referendum on Trump, Obama advised.

The former President left believing the current one had gotten the memo. But over the next six months, Obama saw few signs of improvement. In December, he returned to the White House at Biden’s invitation. This time, Obama’s message was more urgent. He expressed concern the re-election campaign was behind schedule in building out its field operations, and bottlenecked by Biden’s insistence on relying upon an insular group of advisers clustered in the West Wing, according to the same Democratic insider. Biden needed to get it together, or Trump would sweep the seven key battleground states in November, six of which Biden carried in 2020.

Three months later, the 2024 general election is under way, and Biden is indeed in trouble. His stubbornly low approval ratings have sunk into the high 30s, worse than those of any other recent President seeking re-election. He’s trailed or tied Trump in most head-to-head matchups for months. Voters express concerns about his policies, his leadership, his age, and his competency. The coalition that carried Biden to victory in 2020 has splintered; the Democrats’ historic advantage with Black, Latino, and Asian American voters has dwindled to lows not seen since the civil rights movement. Despite an attempted insurrection, 88 felony charges, and a record that prompts former aides to warn of the dangers of reinstalling him in office, Trump has never, in three campaigns for the presidency, been in as strong a position to win the White House as he is now. If the election were held tomorrow, more than 30 pollsters, strategists, and campaign veterans from both parties tell TIME, Biden would likely lose.

As a fog of dread descends on Democrats, Biden’s inner circle is defiantly sanguine. They see a candidate with a strong economy, a sizable cash advantage, and a record of accomplishments on infrastructure, climate change, industrial policy, and consumer protections that will register for more voters as the campaign ramps up. They see a pattern of Democrats overperforming their polling in recent years, from the 2022 midterms to a spate of special elections and abortion referendums. Most of all, they see a historically unpopular opponent. And in the end, they believe, voters dissatisfied with the President will tally the stakes—from reproductive rights to the prospect of mass immigration roundups to the future of U.S. democracy—and pull the lever for Biden again. “Our biggest strength is that 80 million people sent him to the White House before,” says Quentin Fulks, Biden’s principal deputy campaign manager, who notes that Trump needs to find new voters to win. “Our challenge is winning people who have already cast a ballot for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris once.”

Yet that may be a tall order in what’s shaping up to be a contest of which candidate America dislikes less. After a slow start, Biden’s campaign is charging forward, opening field offices, hiring staff, and launching an ad blitz painting Trump as a dangerous autocrat. But even if the President’s sputtering bid finds a new gear, allies say, the country is so bitterly divided that his ability to affect the outcome in November may be limited. Both sides are digging in for a gloomy slugfest, marked by depressed turnout and apocalyptic warnings about the fate that awaits the nation should the other guy win. Publicly, Biden’s brain trust is confident in their turnaround plan. Privately, even some White House insiders admit that they’re scared….

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The result is a winnable race that risks being frittered away, some allies say. “This isn’t that complicated. Call [Pennsylvania Governor] Josh Shapiro, [Michigan Governor] Gretchen Whitmer. Ask them who should be hired and what 20 things need to be done to win those states,” laments a veteran Democratic consultant with experience guiding presidential nominees. “Don’t assume what worked last time will work this one.”

This complaint is echoed by scores of Democratic strategists, who see Biden as a politician captive to the past and content reprising a strategy that worked in the last election but looks increasingly ill-suited to the current one. “This is just who Joe Biden is,” says another top Democratic strategist who worked for Biden and has grown frustrated by the candidate’s reliance on longtime aides who deride outside critics. “This is how he’s always run his campaigns. He and his insiders know better. Last time, it worked, so he didn’t learn any of the lessons, and thinks he can run 2020 again.”…

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The campaign is recruiting thousands of volunteers to connect with voters in their communities about Biden’s record, including through a digital platform called Mobilize.us that helps volunteers set up online events with friends. That multimillion-dollar push, which began in March, will run through the summer. In September, Fulks says, the campaign will shift gears to deliver supporters to the polls, employing everything from door-to-door canvassing to targeted social media, as well as the robust ground games of labor unions and abortion-rights groups.

The campaign is moving advertising dollars away from traditional broadcast channels and toward digital platforms like YouTube, Google search, Facebook, and online sports-streaming sites, where more voters spend their time, says Rob Flaherty, who oversees the campaign’s digital strategy. Despite Biden’s vowing to sign legislation that could ban TikTok if it doesn’t divest from Chinese ownership, his campaign joined the platform in February, churning out clips with titles like “4 insane policies in a 2nd Trump term” and “What is Trump saying lol.” As it works to court bold-faced names like Taylor Swift, Biden’s digital staff plans to tap local influencers in key voting districts who may have only a few thousand followers, but can carry the message to targeted communities….

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Indeed, the biggest reason for optimism in Biden World may be the weakness of his opponent. As Election Day nears and Trump’s speeches and ideas garner the kind of attention they haven’t had since he left office, advisers expect fair-weather Biden supporters will remember how much they dislike his predecessor. “We know the work that we need to do to consolidate our base,” says the campaign’s communications director Michael Tyler. “The campaign is geared toward those efforts, while our opponent is still screaming into an echo chamber of MAGA extremism.”…

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But for Biden to beat the 77-year-old Trump, some allies believe it’s time to remove the bubble wrap. After campaigning successfully in 2020 on promises to restore the “soul of the nation,” Biden still clings to a self-image as a champion of comity. It is a pitch calibrated for an idealized electorate, not the one he has to win over. “People say, ‘I’m not going to vote for Trump, but I don’t know if I can vote for Biden.’ And everything they say has to do with his style: ‘He doesn’t seem to be fighting for us,’” says Representative Jim Clyburn, the former House Democratic whip, who has stepped away from his caucus leadership role to help Biden sharpen his message, urging the campaign to underscore the direct economic benefits of the Biden presidency….

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