Photo: Getty Images North America
President Joe Biden launched his schedule of campaign events in 2024 with an angry speech in Pennsylvania Friday in which he went on the offensive and railed against his likely election opponent, Donald Trump. The speech left some pundits wondering if it did much to inspire voters on the fence about which candidate to choose, and left others wondering whether it inspired confidence in the voters who back Biden to stay the course or gave them yet another reason to bail on the sinking incumbent.
Democratic strategist Melissa DeRosa knows a thing or two about winning campaigns, as she was the former secretary to three-term New York Governor Andrew Cuomo- and she didn’t see a winner here. She summed up Biden’s speech on 710 WOR’s Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning program with a nervous laugh and an admission that, “things are not looking great at the moment; I’m certainly not sleeping well at night.”
“I both read the speech and watched the speech, and the problem was when I watched the speech, because his performance was abysmal,” DeRosa told Berman and Riedel. “He comes off like he’s lost a step, and he comes off very old… People don’t vote against things, generally speaking; they vote for things, and so, where is the affirmative vision? But, overwhelmingly, in poll after poll you see the former President, despite being three times criminally indicted, leading the current President. And so, I don’t think that harping on January 6th… is what is going to win the current President re-election.”
DeRosa had even less confidence in another speech, as Governor Kathy Hochul prepares to deliver her third State of the State speech Tuesday afternoon. “We’ve got real issues, with crime, with affordability, with the migrant crisis, and it doesn’t really feel like we’ve got the leadership to match the moment. When Andrew Cuomo was governor, we would spend a good month rolling out our agenda and going around and making speeches about what our priorities were going to be… and over the last month, we’ve heard nothing [from Hochul]… Not that swimming access isn’t a thing in certain underserved communities, [but] it certainly doesn’t rank on the issues facing our state right now.”
Photo Credit: Getty Images