President Joe Biden has unveiled a new strategy for governing the country: the basement strategy. Under this strategy, Biden will stay in the basement of the White House and conduct all of his business from there. He will not hold press conferences, he will not give speeches, and he will not meet with foreign leaders. Instead, he will communicate with the American people through social media and his weekly address.
How Biden announced his run was instructive. He didn’t give a big speech in front of supporters. Instead, he released a video with shots of January 6th interspersed throughout, marking a return to a strategy he’s perfected over the years. Namely, doing the bare minimum and hoping most people don’t notice how terrible his record is.
The basement strategy has several advantages. First, it will allow Biden to avoid the media and public mistakes. Second, the basement strategy will allow Biden to control his message. Third, the basement strategy will allow Biden to avoid the public. Biden is a very unpopular president, and he is not well-liked by the American people. By staying in the basement, he can avoid the public and avoid being booed and jeered.
The New York Times described Biden’s strategy like this:
“Despite his heavily anticipated re-election announcement on Tuesday, Mr. Biden has no immediate plans to barnstorm the key battlegrounds. Decorative bunting is nowhere to be found, and large rallies will come later.
Instead, Mr. Biden’s next steps look much like his recent ones: leveraging the White House to burnish his record with ribbon-cuttings, and willingly ceding the stage to a Republican presidential primary that is already descending into a dogfight between Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, even before he has entered the race.
The first 24 hours, a heavily scripted period in any campaign, serve as a Biden road map for the months to come: a video announcement and an array of text messages to spur online donations; the behind-the-scenes hiring of his campaign team; an official White House event that doubled as a campaign opportunity; and a rally focused on abortion rights, headlined by the vice president, at a historically Black university.”
