Paul Begala: Joe Biden Has A Secret Weapon For Winning Re-Election In 2024: ‘The Republicans’

Democratic political consultant Paul Begala said President Biden was handed some help this week should he—as Begala predicts—run for re-election: “a secret weapon: the Republicans.” On CNN’s State of the Union Sunday morning, Begala said that the Republicans who tried to upstage Biden during his State of the Union address on Tuesday actually did the opposite. “They allowed him to dispel all of this nonsense of ‘oh, he’s too old’ because they started heckling him and he parried so artfully. He drew them right into his trap on Social Security and Medicare, and sprung it.”

On ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Chris Christie, agreed, saying Republicans made a “big mistake” by heckling the president. “You don’t want to rise to the bait, and they did. A number of them did.”

On CNN, Begala pointed to other signs Biden’s planning to announce a re-election campaign, such as the Democratic Party’s decision to switch up the order of states in the 2024 primaries, replacing Iowa with South Carolina as the first state to vote, a shift seen as giving Black and other minority voters more impact in choosing the nominee.

The change works to boost Biden, who won a decisive victory into South Carolina after his campaign had been written off as dead after finishing in fourth place in Iowa, fifth place in New Hampshire and a distant second in Nevada.

“Just days ago, the press and the pundits had declared his candidacy dead,” Biden said at a victory rally. “Now, thanks to all of you — the heart of the Democratic Party — we just won and we’ve won big because of you, and we are very much alive.”

Biden certainly used the drama of the State of the Union address as material as he traveled to the key swing states of Wisconsin and Florida, telling union workers in Madison, Wisconsin that he was fighting for them against Republican efforts to cut benefits they were entitled to. “We had a spirited debate last night with my Republican friends,” he said. “My Republican friends, they seemed shocked when I raised the plans of some of their members and their caucus to cut Social Security.”

“These benefits belong to you,” the president said, sound very much like a candidate for re-election. “And I will not allow anyone to cut them—not today, not tomorrow, not ever.”

On NBC’s Meet the Press, Symone Sanders said the fireworks over Social Security and Medicare during the State of the Union address handed the Democrats a powerful meat-and-potatoes issue to take to the states where the 2024 campaign will be decided. “After that, you had the president, the vice president, the cabinet going out and reiterating and reinforcing what the president said on that stage.”

Sanders said it was a good example of Democrats taking a powerful issue and seizing it by relentlessly repeating a clear message. “Democrats have to do better about saying the thing over and over and over.”