He ignored his rivals for the Democratic nomination completely, not even hinting at any policy differences.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, Biden’s closest competition in the polls, is taking a very different approach. Sanders went on CNN on Monday night to attack Biden for his history of supporting free trade measures, a deeply divisive issue in the party.
“I helped lead the fight against NAFTA, he voted for NAFTA,” Sanders said, before ticking off other trade pacts he opposed and Biden backed. For good measure, Sanders added, “I voted against the war in Iraq, he voted for it.”
It was Sanders’ third broadside against Biden since he entered the race last week — and it marked a preview of the coming clash between the two septuagenarians that is likely to shape the early contours of the primary.
The competing strategies — Sanders targeting Biden while Biden wraps himself in the Obama legacy and excoriates Trump — illustrate the starkly different wagers the two candidates are making in the outset of the 2020 contest.
Biden’s bet is that his party’s rank-and-file consider the Obama years as a success and are animated chiefly by ejecting Trump. With a substantial lead in early polls, Biden is attempting to remain above the intraparty fray, promising a new era of good feeling after the Trump interregnum and invoking his White House experience at every turn.
“We got plenty of time to respond, I’m not going to get in a debate with my colleagues here,” Biden said Tuesday at an ice cream shop in eastern Iowa, gripping a chocolate and vanilla swirl cone. He declined to directly answer Sanders’ critique, but did call himself “a fair trader” and, notably, said he did not regret his vote for NAFTA as a senator.
The Trump administration represents “an aberrant moment in time,” Biden said Tuesday. Once the fever breaks, to borrow a phrase Obama favored, a consensus-seeker such as Biden can heal the country and work with Republicans he once served with in the Senate to make Washington functional again.
“We have to talk about unity, we have to bring people back together,” he said to applause at a rally in Cedar Rapids, his first stop in Iowa.
Sanders, the leader in early polls until Biden joined the race, feels less urgency to unify the country or even the Democratic Party and has taken a far more aggressive posture toward the front-runner than any other contender. In targeting the former vice president, he is hoping to elevate himself as the leading progressive alternative in a 20-person field filled with candidates hungry for attention.
Sanders is running on the assumption that Democratic voters not only want to defeat Trump but also seek to shed the incremental, within-the-system politics of Obama and Biden as well as Bill and Hillary Clinton.
The current president is only a symptom of a party and a system that must be thwarted not accommodated, Sanders believes, and this moment of economic and racial injustice demands bold, left-wing solutions.
Tactically speaking, this moment also demands that Sanders consolidate his support on the party’s left flank, and that explains an offensive against Biden that retraces some of his most effective lines of attack against Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The Vermont senator criticized Biden last week for beginning his campaign with a pricey fundraiser at the Philadelphia home of a Comcast executive. He pre-empted Biden’s first speech as a candidate Monday by boasting that he was the only candidate in the race to oppose NAFTA, which enables free trade among the United States, Canada and Mexico, and then made his trade critique more explicit Monday night before adding their differing votes on the Iraq War as something of a bonus.
A new national poll of Democratic primary voters helps illustrate why Sanders is so eager to pick a fight with Biden: the former vice president has gained ground since entering the race and enjoys the support of 39% of his party’s voters while Sanders is in second place with 15%.
There are other reasons that Sanders is trying to frame the race in one-on-one terms. The same poll showed that Biden, a mainstream progressive, also enjoys a wide lead right now with liberals, with 32% compared with Sanders’ 19%. While the two menare seen by political insiders as hailing from starkly different wings of the party, here in Iowa, there is considerable overlap in their early bases of support.
A Des Moines Register-CNN survey last month of likely Iowa Democratic caucusgoers indicated that Biden had an overall advantage over Sanders within the margin of error, but more revealing is that their supporters named the other man as their preferred second choice.
That’s partly the result of their being the two best known candidates at this early stage of the race. But the 2016 presidential primary, in both parties, demonstrated that assumptions about voters falling along expected ideological lines can be mistaken.
Longtime Iowa Democrats, however, note that there is another precedent that Sanders must be mindful of: The candidate who goes on the attack in the state is often not the one who reaps the benefit when the candidate being attacked drops in the polls.
“You’ve got to be careful because we don’t like that,” said Dave Nagle, a former Iowa Democratic chairman. He recalled how Dick Gephardt’s attacks on Howard Dean, the front-runner in the 2004 race, only helped John Kerry complete his stunning comeback. “I don’t think it’s helpful for the senator from Vermont to go after a combatant from the same army at this point,” Nagle said.
As for Biden, the only Democrat he is eager to discuss at the moment is the one who made him vice president.
On Tuesday morning, his campaign issued a video featuring the speech Obama delivered when he bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Biden (Obama granted his permission for Biden to use the footage, according to a Biden campaign official).
Asked in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America’’ where he would differ with Obama, Biden responded by emphasizing their shared history. “I’m really proud to have served with Barack,” he said.
And he interrupted himself during his torpid remarks to a few hundred Iowans in Cedar Rapids to testify to Obama’s character in the face of adversity.
“Everything but locusts landed on his desk,” Biden said, drawing a loud ovation in the state that helped propel Obama to the Democratic nomination in 2008.
At the Cone Shoppe in Monticello, Biden said that he was proud of his record and that there would be “plenty of time on the stage” of the party’s debates to engage with his rivals.
But at the moment, he indicated that he was more interested in dairy than disputes over free trade.
“I’m a free ice cream eater,” he told a reporter, changing the subject and laying down a pair of $20s to make clear he didn’t mean it literally.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.