It’s probably as close as the 2020 Presidential campaign will get to Delmarva – although with over 20 Democrats currently in the race, you never know what rocks they’ll crawl under to get the buzz needed to qualify for the first round of debates.
But Joe Biden has chosen Pennsylvania to be the home of “the official beginning of our campaign, held in the birthplace of democracy .” More specifically, it’s going to be held in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, presumably in front of the steps made famous by the movie Rocky.
I’m guessing it’s the compromise choice between beginning it in Scranton where he was born and Delaware, where he spent most of his adult life. (That is, if you don’t count the 44 years he was in some sort of federal elected office in DC: 36 in the Senate representing Delaware and 8 as vice president.) Never mind that Philadelphia is a much larger media market that Scranton or Wilmington and the symbolism of those steps too much to resist for a man who deems himself a champion of the working class.
As an aside, if that is the “official beginning” of the campaign what does that say about the union gathering in Pittsburgh when Biden announced? I suppose he believes they are already in his pocket, like the firefighters union that passed on 2016 but quickly endorsed “Creepy Joe.” It’s interesting that he would allow his campaign staff to organize but “believes the work environment he’s offering is good enough to prevent any push for a union.” I’m sure thousands of others thought the same way.
But one thing I noticed in the announcement of his Philadelphia rally is the prohibition on homemade signs. Obviously that’s an effort to control the message, but it is an open-air rally. And there you run the risk of not being able to fill the space – although I’m betting some compliant local unions will be bussing people in to make the crowd look larger.
That sign prohibition is really a shame, though, because I’d love to see a replica sign like this one:
But we have a lot of J-O-B-S now; in fact, unemployment is at 50 year lows – or should I say back to a time when Joe Biden hadn’t yet been elected to office.
So it will be interesting to see how Joe will argue against more of the same for the economy. I’ll bet he tries, though.