For President Joe Biden, the 2024 campaign ended much as it began: in a room full of union members. But this time he was a surrogate, not the candidate.
Instead of being in the national spotlight, as he did when he spoke at a union conference in Washington on the day he announced his re-election bid in April 2023, his speech on Saturday at the carpenters’ union hall in Scranton, Pennsylvania, was overshadowed by dueling. rallies for Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
And instead of a triumphant and defiant defense of his record and a promise to “get the job done,” Biden’s comments were sentimental and subdued, so much so that at times the audience seemed compelled to pit the commander-in-chief against to get into trouble.
“I’m nothing special,” Biden said at one point, prompting someone in the audience to respond, “Yes, that’s you, Joe,” followed by a round of “Thanks, Joe!” chants.
Administration officials are looking forward to the end of the campaign, which they say will give Biden the opportunity to move forward with his remaining weeks in office with more freedom, according to multiple sources familiar with the West Wing dynamics. Officials no longer have to coordinate all, or at least most, activities with Harris’ official and campaign teams, a daily occurrence since Harris took over the top of the ticket.
Even Biden sometimes checked with senior aides about threatened actions, asking, “Did we direct this through the vice president?” said a senior official.
When Biden ended his candidacy in July, he told his staff he wanted the remaining months of his presidency to be as productive as any comparable period before it. Plans were drawn up for events and initiatives that the advisers believed would both help shape his legacy and boost Harris’ candidacy.
But the public campaign role Biden envisioned when he promised to be the Harris-Walz campaign’s “best volunteer” has been limited to just a handful of targeted visits to key states to reach working-class and union voters, like the pair of labor-focused events he held in Philadelphia and Scranton this weekend.
White House officials have worked to accelerate implementation of Biden’s domestic legislative achievements, while his national security team has had more time to work directly with him on foreign policy priorities, including the Middle East, which had been a major distraction to the campaign.
Advisors are working on what Biden’s final weeks and hours as president will look like.
There are some early talks about what will happen when Biden leaves office, a senior administration official said, including perhaps a twist on the traditional final ride aboard Air Force One for the outgoing president. Amtrak has said its new fleet of Acela high-speed trains could be on the rails by the end of the year, marking a symbolic departure from Washington for the man whose career began with daily train trips from Delaware when he was a senator and even occasionally as vice president. president, the official said.
Biden has struggled with being left out of the national conversation and has only generated headlines lately for off-script comments about “locking up” Trump and for cleaning up after he appeared to call Trump’s supporters “trash.”
He also repeats his usual refrain against Trump. During a recent stop in New Hampshire, Biden shared what concerned allies conveyed during his recent trip to Germany. “They’ll quietly pull me aside, one leader after another, and say, ‘Joe, he can’t win. My democracy is at stake,” he said.
At the same meeting, he expressed some moderate optimism about the election results.
“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you’re going to do in this election,” he said, before adding, “As a friend of mine would say, from my lips to God’s ears on this.”
While Biden has played a limited role lately, first lady Jill Biden has quietly been among the busiest campaign surrogates. Since early October, she has organized more than 20 campaign events in all seven battleground states, including three stops on Sunday in southeastern Pennsylvania.
“I know you can feel it, the excitement of people who are all ready to elect a new generation of leaders,” she said at a union event in King of Prussia.
She praised Harris as a “decisive, strong leader” who inherited from her mother “the power to create change.” But she also made an argument that other surrogates have largely left aside, at one point asking the audience, “Are we better off today than we were four years ago?”
“Yes,” she said, refuting a key argument from the Trump campaign. “In Donald Trump’s America, our country was closed because of the pandemic. … Schools were closed and Donald Trump created more chaos at every turn.”
Jill Biden continued on to North Carolina on Monday, while her husband returned to the White House, where he will remain until Election Day.
Harris’ first stop on the final day of the campaign was in Scranton, where she didn’t mention Trump’s name once for the second day in a row.
She didn’t mention Biden’s either.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
