Mr. Biden, who has served in public life for around a half-century, is emphasizing his government experience, seeking to cast himself as a steady, seasoned hand in a dangerous and uncertain world.
As the coronavirus crisis has unfolded, he has looked for ways to help voters picture him as commander in chief, formulating recommendations rooted in advice from health care and economics experts. Those suggestions include making coronavirus tests broadly accessible, and free. He has said there should be no out-of-pocket cost for patients to receive an eventual vaccine, either. And he has been sharply critical of President Trump’s response to the virus, accusing him of reacting too slowly.
Mr. Biden served as vice president in the Obama administration during the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and health care remains a top priority for him. It’s an issue he often discusses in the context of his family’s personal tragedies: He lost his first wife and an infant daughter in a car accident in 1972, and in 2015, his son Beau Biden died of brain cancer. Health care, he said in an early television ad, is “personal” to him. He supports adding a public option to the Affordable Care Act, but opposes “Medicare for all,” the sweeping single-payer measure advocated by some progressives in his party, including Senator Bernie Sanders.
Mr. Biden, who served for decades in the Senate, firmly believes in the value of bipartisanship and insists on extending overtures to Republicans even in a moment when many in his own party don’t see negotiating partners on the other side. As a former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he also speaks passionately about asserting and defending America’s role as a leader on the global stage.
Donald Trump stoked false claims that Barack Obama had lied about his education. During a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump said, “Our current president came out of nowhere. Came out of nowhere. In fact, I’ll go a step further: The people that went to school with him, they never saw him, they don’t know who he is. It’s crazy.” This is false. Numerous accounts from Obama’s college classmates refute Trump’s claim, including Obama’s Columbia roommate, Phil Doerner.
– March 30, 2011 – Donald Trump was a vocal proponent of the “birther” myth, claiming Barack Obama was not born in the United States. In 2011, Trump told Bill O’Reilly, “If you are going to be president of the United States you have to be born in this country. And there is a doubt as to whether or not he was… He doesn’t have a birth certificate. He may have one, but there’s something on that, maybe religion, maybe it says he is a Muslim. I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t want that. Or he may not have one. But I will tell you this. If he wasn’t born in this country, it’s one of the great scams of all time.” In response to the “birther” conspiracy theory, the State of Hawaii released Barack Obama’s short- and long-form birth certificate.
BIDEN 2020
