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Appearing in a Teamsters hall, Biden scorned corporate greed, pledged to revive unions and said the minimum wage should be lifted to $15 an hour nationwide. He also centered his message squarely in the state of his birth, telling a few hundred supporters who greeted him with “We Want Joe” chants that Pennsylvania is key to Democrats’ chances of reclaiming the White House.
“If I’m going to beat Donald Trump in 2020, it’s going to happen here,” said the former vice president, noting that his party has “had a little bit of trouble” here — a reference to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss in Pennsylvania.
Biden, who is making his third bid for the presidency, offered few specifics about his economic plans and reprised many of the broad themes that have long been staples of his stump speech.
He did, however, use the beginning and conclusion of his remarks to pointedly criticize Trump. He invoked the deadly attack at a synagogue here last fall and another in California over the weekend to argue that “we are in a battle for America’s soul.” It was a direct follow-up to his announcement video last week, in which he cited the president’s response to the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, two years ago as “a threat to this nation” that “was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.”
Taking on Trump directly, Biden said, “Donald Trump is the only president who has decided not to represent the whole country,” accusing him of only caring about “his base.”
His harsh assessment continued what seems sure to be a regular barrage of attacks on a president who has proved eager to engage in verbal warfare. In a tweet on Monday morning, Trump said he was elected because of the failures of President Barack Obama and Biden. “They didn’t do the job and now you have Trump, who is getting it done — big time.”
Yet even before he took the stage, Biden got a sharp reminder that before he can take on the president, he first must survive the Democratic primary, in which he has instantly become the front-runner.
Sen. Bernie Sanders issued a news release boasting that he is the only presidential candidate to oppose the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, and other free trade measures, a thinly-veiled attack on the former vice president as he begins his campaign with union members in a region walloped by manufacturing losses. As a senator, Biden supported NAFTA and voted to create permanent normal trade relations with China.
It was the second time since Biden entered the race last Thursday that Sanders, his closest competition in the polls, has targeted him, and another sign of what could be a robust debate between a mainstream liberal and a democratic socialist.
Sanders had a rally of his own in Pittsburgh earlier this month and quietly met with union leaders while he was in town. He also invited Leo Gerard, the head of the Pittsburgh-based United Steelworkers union, to his office for a meeting earlier this year, according to a Sanders campaign official.
Biden, a longtime supporter of labor, made no mention of Sanders in his remarks, but one of the former vice president’s leading allies used his introductory speech to send a message to Democratic voters about the importance of not drifting far from the political mainstream.
“We can’t have a nominee that is too far left,” said Harold Schaitberger, the president of the national firefighters’ union, which offered its endorsement of Biden on Monday. Democrats will lose, Schaitberger said, if they put forward a candidate with “high-minded” ideas but “little chance of winning.”
Interviews with attendees turned up similar views, as voters focused on Biden’s viability as much as his agenda. “I think Joe can win,” said Pat Martin-Carr, a retired school psychologist and Pittsburgh resident who admitted that she is not committed yet and also likes Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
Jackie Zimmers, a stay-at-home mother from nearby Butler County, who was sporting a “Biden for President” button on her baby carrier, predicted “he would get some of the Democrats back” that the party lost in 2016.
Some Democrats, however, are concerned that the 76-year-old Biden has ample vulnerabilities, many related to his long record as a lawmaker. Anita Hill said last week that she was still dissatisfied with how Biden, then a senator, treated her when she testified before his committee during Justice Clarence Thomas’ 1991 confirmation hearings.
Biden made no mention of the matter during his Monday speech, but in an interview set to air Tuesday on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” he sought to bring closure to the issue by saying, “I take responsibility that she did not get treated well.”
Biden’s debut here as a candidate Monday represented something of a soft entry into the race for him, and was suffused with political and personal symbolism.
Western Pennsylvania was once filled with reliably Democratic voters, many of them union members, but the state tipped to Trump three years ago in part because many working-class whites in this region abandoned their ancestral party. No Democratic nominee has won the White House without carrying Pennsylvania since 1948, and the promise of Biden’s candidacy is that his appeal with this bloc of the electorate could swing the state, along with other Big 10 battlegrounds, back from the Republicans.
Democrats barely broke a sweat in retaining the governorship and a Senate seat last year and picked up three House seats, all in the heavily-suburban, southeastern part of the state where Trump’s popularity has plummeted.
Biden, as he rarely fails to note, spent his early childhood years in Scranton and has long trumpeted his status as this state’s “third senator.” He is particularly close to union officials here, having jogged his way through Pittsburgh’s Labor Day parade in the past, including in 2015 when he was considering a presidential run.
“He connects, his voice resonates and they know he’s got a track record of performance on their behalf,” said Schaitberger.
But Pittsburgh offers a glimpse at Biden’s challenges as well as his opportunities. The city, its workforce and its politics are all rapidly changing.
This is no longer the smokestack-belching, steel-producing industrial powerhouse of yore. Health care, technology and the sciences now drive the economy. And while the United Steelworkers union is still based downtown, and claims the most local members of any labor group, the more diverse, service-industry unions are growing.
Even the choice of venue for Biden’s appearance illustrated the city’s transition. When he appeared before hundreds of firefighters and building trade members at a well-worn Teamsters hall, he was standing in a thoroughly gentrified neighborhood, Lawrenceville, that is home to a ramen joint, a number of boutiques that trumpet their female ownership and, naturally, a hipster coffee shop.
But his audience reflected an older Pittsburgh, full of union members and retirees, many of them clad in the black and gold of the firefighters’ union. Conscious of needing to broaden his appeal, Biden used his remarks to call for “an inclusive” economy and had an African American woman, Ronniece Sirmons, introduce him.
Sirmons, a Pittsburgh teacher, made sure to note that Biden had been vice president for the country’s first black president.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.