WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden kicked off his election-year campaign Friday in Pennsylvania by calling democracy “America’s sacred cause,” an issue he expects to help him capture a state crucial to his re-election hopes.
“Today we are here to answer the most important of questions: Is democracy still America’s sacred cause?” Mr. Biden said a day before the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection by supporters of defeated President Donald Trump.
“This is not rhetorical, academic, or hypothetical,” he said. “Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time. And It’s what the 2024 election is all about.”
Mr. Biden said that the Jan. 6 protesters came to Washington even after all the votes were counted and after all the courts threw out bogus claims of voter fraud.
Now, Mr. Trump calls those rioters patriots and promises to pardon them, if re-elected, Mr. Biden said.
“Trump said there was a lot of love on Jan. 6,” Mr. Biden said. “The rest of the nation, including law enforcement, saw a lot of hate and violence. Trump was trying to steal history the way he was trying to steal the election.”
Mr. Biden was joined by Gov. Josh Shapiro, U.S. Sen. John Fetterman and some eastern Pennsylvania House Democrats at the speech held at Montgomery County Community College in Blue Bell, just a half-hour from Valley Forge National Historical Park, the site where Gen. George Washington and his troops spent the winter of 1777-78.
As the first president of the United States, Washington presided over the first peaceful transfer of power when he voluntarily stepped down after two terms in office, ceding the presidency to John Adams. Mr. Biden said Washington was so popular that he could have been a king, or served way beyond the two terms he did as the elected chief executive.
“But that wasn’t the America he and the American troops of Valley Forge had fought for,” Mr. Biden said. “In America, genuine leaders — democratic leaders with a small D — don’t hold on to power relentlessly. Our leaders return power to the people. And they do it willingly, because that's the deal.”
Mr. Biden delivered a speech on preserving democracy at Independence Hall in Philadelphia a little more than two months before the 2022 midterm elections where Democrats exceeded expectations, and campaign officials said he plans to return to the subject time and again this year, providing a contrast with Mr. Trump.
U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin, who led the House effort to impeach Mr. Trump after Jan. 6, said in an interview Friday that the 2022 elections showed how potent the issue of protecting democracy was.
“This is a country that loves its freedom and its democracy,” said Mr. Raskin, D-Md. “People are waking up to the fact that there's a clear and present danger to everything we believe in right now.”
That’s also the subject of the president’s first 2024 campaign ad, set to begin running on television Saturday in Pennsylvania and six other battleground states.
“I’ve made the preservation of American democracy the central issue of our presidency,” Mr. Biden says at the start of the 60-second spot.
The campaign quickly sent out a fundraising email after the speech.
Mr. Trump’s campaign responded quickly to Friday’s speech, claiming that Mr. Biden was the candidate “attacking American democracy.”
The campaign cited the prosecution of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, various indictments against Mr. Trump, and Mr. Biden’s efforts to move toward electric cars and more energy efficient appliances.
And the former president’s campaign criticized voter identification laws in Pennsylvania and several other states as inadequate, even though studies have shown voter fraud is extremely rare. In one of the studies, Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, found just 31 possible fraud cases out of more than 1 billion votes from 2000 through 2014.
Before his speech Friday, Mr. Biden stopped at the Valley Forge park to watch a wreath-laying ceremony at the National Memorial Arch, which memorializes the encampment, according to White House pool reports. He then visited Washington’s headquarters, a stone house he used during the encampment in the Revolutionary War.
That backdrop was meant to contrast Washington’s transition from presidential power to 2021, when supporters of Mr. Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to prevent Congress from certifying the electoral votes that gave Mr. Biden the presidency.
After the Capitol building was cleared of rioters, a majority of House Republicans voted to reject state-certified votes in both Pennsylvania and Arizona.
Mr. Trump was impeached a week later on charges that he incited the insurrection (though he was acquitted by the Senate). He was indicted last August by special counsel Jack Smith on charges that he tried to overturn the election he knew had lost.
Mr. Biden said 2024 will be the first national election since “insurrectionists placed a dagger at the throat of American democracy.”
“We know who Donald Trump is. The question we have to answer is who we are,” Mr. Biden said.
“The power is in your hands. After all that we’ve been through in our history — from independence to civil war to two world wars to a pandemic to insurrection — I refuse to believe that in 2024 we Americans will choose to walk away from what's made us the greatest nation in the history of the world — freedom, liberty. Democracy is still a sacred cause.”
Jonathan D. Salant: jsalant@post-gazette.com,, @JDSalant
First Published: January 5, 2024, 11:38 p.m.
Updated: January 6, 2024, 8:31 p.m.