President Biden’s campaign will begin airing a new 60-second television ad in key battleground states on Monday as the presumptive Democratic nominee
President Biden’s campaign will begin airing a new 60-second television ad in key battleground states on Monday as the presumptive Democratic nominee seeks to recover from a stilted debate performance last week in Atlanta that has shaken his standing in the 2024 race.
The ad, provided to The New York Times ahead of its first airing, doesn’t show footage of Mr. Biden’s hoarse, halting delivery before an audience of more than 50 million at Thursday’s debate.
Instead, the ad features narration by Mr. Biden that is culled entirely from the rally that his campaign staged the next day in North Carolina. At that event, Mr. Biden, with the top two buttons of his dress shirt open under his suit jacket, gave the kind of energetic performance that allies had been hoping for the night before.
With dramatic music pulsing in the background, the ad begins with attacks on former President Donald J. Trump before Mr. Biden, 81, pivots to acknowledging his own limitations.
“Folks, I know I’m not a young man,” Mr. Biden says. “But I know how to do this job. I know right from wrong. I know how to tell the truth. And I know, like millions of Americans know, when you get knocked down you get back up.”
He punctuates that final line with an emphatic fist pump.
The ad comes after 72 of the most intensive hours of the campaign for Mr. Biden. Rattled donors debated among themselves about what could be done after Mr. Biden’s debate performance, and the White House and the Biden campaign raced into overdrive to circle the political wagons behind the president.
Mr. Biden spent Sunday at Camp David with some of his closest relatives, who urged him to fight on, which is broadly the theme of the new ad.
“Americans deserve a president who doesn’t back down from a fight, and that’s Joe Biden,” Michael Tyler, the Biden campaign’s communications director, said in a statement.
The first half of the ad features Mr. Biden discussing Mr. Trump’s debate comments on the economy, the pandemic and his role in the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
“Did you see Trump last night?” Mr. Biden says in the opening line of the ad.
At the debate, Mr. Biden struggled to speak in an unscripted format. He used a teleprompter for the North Carolina rally, which is where his remarks for the ad were drawn from.
The campaign said the ad would air on television and on digital platforms in the battleground states. The campaign said it was targeting a younger and more diverse audience through networks such as ESPN, TNT, Bravo, FX and Comedy Central, as well as sports programs for larger audiences and the season premiere of “The Bachelorette.”
The Biden campaign has aggressively sought to tamp down calls for Mr. Biden to step aside after his poor debate performance. Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the campaign chair, wrote a memo on Saturday evening dismissing “all the hand-wringing.”
“This will be a very close election,” she wrote. “It was always going to be.”
www.nytimes.com
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