Former Vice President Joe Biden launched his third bid for the presidency on Thursday, positioning himself as a trusted champion of the middle class eager to take the fight to President Donald Trump.
In a video released early Thursday morning, Biden said that "we are in a battle for the soul of this nation."
In the video's opening, Biden highlighted the 2017 violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, where during a large gathering of white nationalists and counterprotesters a white supremacist rammed his car into an opposition group, killing one person.
Biden noted that President Donald Trump said there were some "very fine people on both sides" (ah, but context matters - ed.) in Charlottesville, where the white nationalists were protesting the city's plan to take down a statue of Robert E. Lee, a Confederate general.
"In that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I'd seen in my lifetime," Biden said, adding that he believes "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," Biden continued. "Who we are. And I cannot stand by and watch that happen."
If you're keeping score at home, Biden is now the 20th Democrat to seek the party's nomination for the 2020 presidential race.
While Biden has politically evolved further left in the 21st century, he certainly isn't as "kook fringe" as fellow candidates Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren. That is certainly his biggest advantage given a recent New York Times study showed that the majority of Democrat voters consider themselves more moderate than those who permeate Twitter. However, those who will be delegates at the 2020 Democratic National Convention will be of the grassroots ilk, and they tend to be more "progressive." As such, we could see a repeat of 2016 when you had "outsider" Bernie Sanders (who's been in Congress since 1991, but yeah, "outsider") taking on the establishment choice (in 2016 it was Hillary Clinton). And while Clinton was ramrodded through in '16, Sanders is much more formidable this time around.
Speaking of the "WOKE!" left, it's going to be a blast to watch them over the next several months. The reason being is they now have to grapple with their top goal of defeating Trump versus the fact that two septuagenarian, straight white men are the most formidable candidates among the Dems.
If nothing else, debates between Biden and Sanders will be entertaining in that it will have a vibe of two grumpy old men playing chess in the park while arguing over whose move it is.
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