This video was released early this morning:
ABC News has some highlights:
“The question we are facing is whether in the years ahead we have more freedom or less freedom. More rights or fewer,” he said in the video, entitled ‘Freedom,’ which was posted to his social media account early Tuesday morning.
“This is not a time to be complacent. That’s why I’m running for re-election.”
The video announcement focuses on Biden’s closing argument to the country, making his case for four more years in office to “finish this job” — a line he previewed during his State of the Union address this year.
“Every generation of Americans has faced a moment when they’ve had to defend democracy. Stand up for our personal freedoms. Stand up for the right to vote and our civil rights. And this is our moment,” Biden says in the video.
“Let’s finish this job, I know we can.”
As part of that closing argument, the president also calls out “MAGA extremists” for attacking “bedrock freedoms” in the video.
While Biden does not directly name any of his GOP rivals, images from the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and members of the Republican Party, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, flash on the screen.
WaPo (“Biden team plans television ads after Tuesday reelection announcement“):
President Biden will buy television ad time later this week to push his reelection message after announcing his campaign Tuesday morning in an online video, according to people familiar with the plans.
The president will also announce the senior ranks of his new campaign team Tuesday. Julie Chavez Rodriguez, a top aide at the White House and veteran of Vice President Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign, will become his campaign manager, the people said.
Quentin Fulks, the campaign manager for Sen. Raphael G. Warnock’s winning 2022 Georgia Senate campaign, will join Rodriguez as her deputy, marking the first time a sitting president has chosen a Latina woman and African American man to run his campaign.
A person involved in the process said Rodriguez was the top choice of all of Biden’s senior advisers, the president and the first lady, after an extensive interview process that included a wide array of Democratic campaign talent. A California native, she is the granddaughter of labor leader Cesar Chavez and a veteran of the Obama White House, later going to work for Harris both in her Senate office and as political director on her presidential campaign.
Rodriguez worked as a deputy campaign manager on the Biden-Harris campaign during the general election. In the White House, Rodriguez has been in charge of the office of intergovernmental affairs for Biden, managing his relationships with governors, mayors and county leaders around the country.
Biden has also selected a suite of co-chairs for his campaign, including Reps. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.) and Veronica Escobar (D-Tex.), among others.
Biden will release his campaign announcement video early Tuesday morning, and in the afternoon he is scheduled to deliver remarks at the North America’s Building Trades Unions Legislative Conference.
The launch of his campaign closely echoes the start of his 2020 presidential campaign, which he also kicked off on April 25 and then followed with an event at a union hall in Pittsburgh.
POLITICO (“As Biden readies a reelection launch he fills out his team“) adds:
The first two staff hires will allow Biden to once again demonstrate a commitment to diversity and trust in his party’s next generation of talent. Fulks, 33, is Black, and Rodriguez, 45, is the granddaughter of labor icon Cesar Chavez and the highest-ranking Latino in the White House.
[…]
Rodriguez has never led a campaign before. But she was a senior adviser and deputy campaign manager on Biden’s 2020 run and is close to the president and well respected by the quintet of top Biden aides expected to help guide the reelection effort: Mike Donilon, Anita Dunn, Jen O’Malley Dillon, Steve Richetti and Bruce Reed. She also built up goodwill from her time working in the Obama administration.
“She isn’t the most operational person they could have gone with, but she has close relationships with the president and his staff,” one person who has worked with Rodriguez said. “She gets shit done and doesn’t piss people off while doing it.”
The same could be said for Biden. Granted that the election is a year and a half away, the odds of his getting a second term have to be exceedingly high. The opposition party is in absolute disarray and their core supporters are dying off by the day. There’s not a plausible candidate who can emerge from the MAGA-infested primaries who I can see beating him.
