It was a quiet day in Emmaus, Pa. The only sound on Main Street was the idling engine of the sleek black truck that some call a rolling doomsday communications control center, which was parked outside the bike shop. The men with guns dressed all in black were perched on the roof using binoculars to scan the area for terrorists or other bad guys.
The president had come to this picturesque town of 11,000 to chat with a few local business owners, order a smoothie, visit the local firehouse and, if it so happened that his visit produced a few pictures useful for his re-election campaign, all the better. Did he mention the new statistics on start-up businesses? No worries, he would be happy to repeat them.
An election year has arrived, and it is time for President Biden to get out of the White House and hit the road for votes. He is not the only one looking for Norman Rockwell images in small-town shops and diners these days — check out the traveling circus in Iowa over the weekend, heading to New Hampshire after that. But he is the only one who comes with a mile-long motorcade of police cars, Secret Service vehicles, ambulances and enough sophisticated military hardware to launch a nuclear war from the stool at the coffee shop.
Retail campaigning is not easy when you’re the commander in chief. The counterassault team does not really lend an air of authentic spontaneity to the whole venture. The venues he visits are chosen in advance, the route he takes is chosen in advance, the people he meets are chosen in advance. If it’s possible, a significant chunk of the town is roped off. Nothing says “hey, friend” like a metal-detecting wand and a bomb-sniffing dog.
But artificial and surreal as it may be, allies have been agitating for Mr. Biden to get on the hustings, away from the Beltway and the Situation Room. He has, after all, spent a lifetime working rooms, shaking hands, slapping arms, squeezing shoulders, kissing babies. His Uncle Joe connection with everyday people, allies argue, is perhaps his biggest political superpower.
“This is exactly the kind of area the president should be visiting,” said Representative Susan Wild, Democrat of Pennsylvania, who accompanied him to Emmaus on Friday and whose swing district is rated a tossup by The Cook Political Report. “This is quintessential Middle America — even though we’re not in the middle of America.”
The worry is that Mr. Biden has lost Middle America, or at least a critical chunk of it, thanks to inflation or his age or the problems at the border or whatever. If he wants to win those voters back in November, Democrats say, he needs to show that he still understands where they are coming from and has a better sense of their interests than his challengers.
And so the president began last week by dropping by Hannibal’s Kitchen in Charleston, S.C., a down-home soul-food restaurant known for its crab and shrimp rice and decidedly unfancy environs. (“What the restaurant lacks in ambience, they more than make up for in taste,” according to its own website.) He ended the week by dropping by a few shops in Emmaus, which boasts of being ranked the fifth-most “heart-warmingly beautiful small town in Pennsylvania.”
Mr. Biden sought to claim credit for an improving economy, highlighting that more new small businesses have opened in his three years in office than during the term of his predecessor and possible opponent, former President Donald J. Trump. He attributed low poll ratings for his economic record to challenges communicating with voters.
“If you notice, they’re feeling much better about how the economy is doing,” Mr. Biden told reporters at the Allentown Fire Training Academy north of Emmaus on Friday. “What we haven’t done is let them know exactly who got it changed.”
When hunting for votes, Mr. Biden has a well-worn shtick, honed during campaigns going back to his first bid for office in 1970, before many of the people he runs into…
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