He wears aviators and baseball caps. He visits ice cream parlors and barbecues and asks to meet influencers who can post images of him on TikTok and Instagram. He talks to reporters more often and answers questions about the Middle East, Republicans and, of course, his age.
None of this is a coincidence. As President Biden faces what polls show is great concern over his 81 years and a close election against his likely opponent, Donald J. Trump, the White House strategy is to run him out of office . protective bubblee and directly address the concerns of voters.
The issue came to a head last month when Mr. Biden angrily defended himself against a special counsel report that described him as an “elderly, well-meaning man with a poor memory.” The president has quickly become the favorite punchline of late-night talk show hosts, angering his allies, who recognize that while Mr. Biden can’t go back, he can at least try to reset the way which voters perceive it to be.
“I’ve been saying to the campaign for several months: ‘Please let him be Joe Biden,’ and many others too,” Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware and close ally of Biden, said in an interview. president. “It’s not just good for the campaign. It’s good for him and for the country that Joe Biden has the opportunity to come out from behind the podium and be less President Joe Biden and more Joe.”
To that end, Mr. Biden is expected to spin the age issue to his advantage by highlighting his legislative accomplishments in his State of the Union address Thursday night. The point he will make, aides say, is that his accomplishments as president might have escaped less experienced politicians.
Part of the White House strategy, in place since the start of the year, is to focus Mr. Biden’s trips outside Washington more on social media and one-on-one experiences with voters. The White House this year began inviting local residents and content creators to meet Mr. Biden during campaign stops, where the president often takes a few moments to introduce himself.
Some of Mr. Biden’s top advisers, including Rob Flaherty, deputy campaign manager, and Anita Dunn, who oversees Mr. Biden’s communications strategy, believe that social media influencers and residents the president meets during his visits have the capacity to introduce Mr. Biden. to a younger and more diverse audience who would not otherwise know him. (When Mr. Biden visited family in North Carolina in January, a Tic Tac the visit from one of his hosts racked up 4 million views, according to statistics shared by the Biden campaign.)
In an interview, Mr. Flaherty said Mr. Biden often sends a multitude of requests to aides working on digital media for the campaign. Last week, when Mr. Trump compared himself to Aleksei A. Navalny, the late Russian opposition leader, the president asked his aides to give him an iPad and asked them to post a video on TikTok of him reacting to Mr. Trump’s comment.
“It comes from his brain,” Mr. Flaherty said.
The president sometimes rewrites tweets to his liking and improvises his own video responses, Mr. Flaherty said. “He has more demands than I’m sometimes willing to meet.”
The White House’s official position is that getting the president out of his bubble has less to do with voters’ concerns about his age than getting him in front of people during an election year. “We have always known that the most effective way to reach the American people is to hear President Biden present his views directly and authentically,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement Tuesday. communicated.
Mr. Biden’s close allies say that whatever the official statements, it is essential that the president shows he is ready to campaign and seek a second term, starting with his speech on Thursday.
“He needs to dispel the fear that he’s sort of on his last leg,” said state Sen. Dick Harpootlian, a South Carolina Democrat and longtime Biden supporter. The president and his advisers, he said, “have addressed this issue more head-on, and he should address it head-on as part of the State of the Union.”
In a New York Times and Siena College poll conducted late last month, 56% of Democrats nationally said they thought Mr. Biden was too old to be an effective president.
” Is it a problem ? Yes of course. No one is perfect in terms of biography,” said Rep. Ro Khanna, a progressive Democrat from California. Khanna added that presenting a forward-looking agenda to the country is as important as trying to allay concerns about the president’s age. “Campaigns must be about the future. They must be exciting. They must be bold, they must have new ideas. And I think if he did that, it’s a way of putting the age issue aside.
Biden campaign officials say that once the election becomes a choice between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, who is only four years younger, age will become a concern among Democratic and independent voters. The race will not hinge on Mr. Biden’s mental health, they say, but on issues related to that of Mr. Trump.
In recent weeks, the campaign and key Democratic supporters have highlighted Mr. Trump’s mistakes, part of an effort to neutralize age as an issue in a likely rematch between the two oldest presidential candidates in the story.
“Listen to Donald Trump who’s rambling, making no sense, doesn’t even remember who he’s running against,” Hillary Clinton said in an interview with SiriusXM on Monday. “If you’re worried that one person doesn’t necessarily know what’s going on, I would be much more worried about Donald Trump.”
In practice, letting Joe be Joe can be harder than it seems.
At events and speeches, Mr. Biden’s aides have made a habit of showing no reaction to his mistakes, whether he is confusing foreign leaders at a campaign event or confusing Ukraine and Gaza during his remarks in the Oval Office. They closely observe Mr. Biden’s interactions with people on the trip and share nods when he takes the right photo — always away from reporters — at a bar or at a fire station.
They also rejected criticism that Mr. Biden seemed too casual in some settings, such as when he responded to a question about Gaza while eating an ice cream cone. The fact, his allies say, is that Mr. Biden was available to ask questions.
Much of the encouragement to let Joe be Joe comes from the president himself, according to his aides and people who know him.
“I don’t think anyone should think that Joe Biden isn’t doing what Joe Biden ultimately wants to do,” said John Morgan, a Democratic donor. Members of Mr. Biden’s family, including his son Hunter; his wife, Jill; and his sister, Valerie Biden Owens, also advocate for Mr. Biden to be himself, despite their shared concern that the presidency will wear on him.
Mr. Morgan said he had noticed an uptick in Mr. Biden’s activity and appearances lately, including the president’s comments about his annual physical last week. joke that the doctors who examined him “think I look too young.” Mr. Morgan said tackling the issue directly was the best way for Mr. Biden to address it during such a high-stakes appearance.
“I think it’s always wise to address the elephant in the room,” Mr. Morgan said. “I think you do it with humor, and then I think you do it seriously.”
