President Joe Biden’s apology for calling Georgia nursing student Laken Riley’s alleged murderer an “illegal” illustrated two major dilemmas for his reelection campaign.
The most obvious is that worrying about the correct terminology for describing someone believed to have murdered a U.S. citizen itself exemplifies Biden’s timorous and largely disastrous approach to the border.
But it also revealed the degree to which it is going to be difficult for Biden to bridge the generation gap within the Democratic Party, despite a lifetime of chasing its center of gravity.
Most of the reviews of Biden’s State of the Union address noted the president’s fighting spirit, including in extemporaneous exchanges with congressional Republican hecklers.
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The barbs on entitlement spending cuts are canned lines at this point, quips that had worked for him previously. His back-and-forth with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) over Riley was more or less spontaneous — although it was likely he was to some extent prepared by the White House staff for GOP lawmakers to bring it up — and contained three problems.
One is that Biden mispronounced Riley’s first name. The second is that he described her as having been slain by an “illegal,” a term no longer used by portions of the Democratic base. And the third was that he asked about the homicides committed by “legals,” presumably referring to Americans.
The first and third problems are likely to further inflame voters outraged by Biden’s feckless handling of the border. But the third generated immediate blowback from within Biden’s own party, especially the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. He was forced to stand down.
“I shouldn’t have used ‘illegal,’” he told Jonathan Capehart on MSNBC. “It’s undocumented.”
Biden is 81 years old. While he has spent decades following, though not trying to get too far ahead of, the Democratic Party’s leftward lurch, he can only keep up so much with the rapid march of intersectionality.
“Illegal” is the word that came out of Biden’s mouth because it was an acceptable term for most of his career, including all 36 years he spent in the Senate. The phrase “illegal immigrant” wasn’t banished from Associated Press style until 2013, when Biden was 70 and in his second term as vice president.
Biden beat a slew of woke young Democrats on his way to the 2020 presidential nomination. This turned out to be what his party needed to oust former President Donald Trump from the Oval Office that year.
Yet the need to keep these voters motivated to turn out for an octogenarian without turning off the rest of the electorate is making it difficult to keep Trump from returning.
Appeasing a new generation of progressives plus doing the opposite of whatever Trump would do is precisely how we got the border crisis under Biden in the first place. It will increasingly become a problem for Biden as he tries to thread the needle on the Israel-Hamas war.
A key conceit of Biden’s State of the Union speech was that while he and Trump are both old, only the incumbent is in touch with the progressive tenor of the times.
Biden is without question more liberal than Trump, but it is virtually impossible for a man of his age who has spent most of his adult life outside the Harvard faculty lounge to truly be in touch with the zeitgeist. All he can do is play up the contrast with Trump.
“Look, when I spoke about the difference between Trump and me, one of the things I talked about in the border was his, the way he talks about vermin, the way he talks about these people polluting the blood,” Biden told MSNBC. “I talked about what I’m not going to do. What I won’t do. I’m not going to treat any, any, any of these people with disrespect.”
The contrast does not always work in Biden’s favor, however. While Biden was equivocating about what word to use to describe Riley’s alleged killer, Trump was meeting with her family.
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All these word games come as polls show Biden slipping further with Hispanic voters. His campaign has tried immigration-cenetric messages to win them back, hitting Trump’s past and future border policies. Many of these voters are themselves unhappy about what is happening at the southern border, however.
Biden has at times been able to use his senior status to provide a form of adult supervision of the Democrats’ squabbling electoral coalition. The Laken Riley incident suggests the balance of power is shifting. Biden may soon have as much control over his party as he does the border.