81 years young, Biden's campaign is advertising his age in a new way
Plus: Here comes the Nikki Haley advertising blitz
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81 years young, Biden's campaign is advertising his age in a new way
Here comes the Nikki Haley advertising blitz
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81 years young, Biden’s campaign is advertising his age in a new way
President Joe Biden marked his 81st birthday Monday by pardoning the Minnesota turkeys Liberty and Bell and mixing up Britney Spears and Taylor Swift.
In Biden’s defense, getting tickets to a Britney concert is difficult these days (“Pushing forward in my music career is not my focus at the moment,” Spears wrote on page 264 in The Woman In Me. “Being an entertainer was great, but over the last five years my passion to entertain in front of a live audience has lessened. I do it for myself now.”), but the gaffe raises the question raised by Ego Nwodim’s Los Angeles Times reporter in the Saturday Night Live cold open, “I have a question, you’re old.”
The reelection campaign for America’s oldest president took a different approach to celebrating Biden’s birthday online this year than the most recent past presidents, and it gives us a hint about how they might handle his age in the coming campaign.
Birthdays have become annual fundraising and list-building events for POTUSes and FLOTUSes and their parties. Former President Donald Trump, who’s less than four years younger than Biden but seems to get half as much grief about it, was fêted on Facebook last year by the Republican National Committee, which called his birthday “Trumpfest” and ran digital ads that led to a landing page where donors were given a line to write him a note.
For former first lady Melania Trump’s birthday in April, the RNC asked supporters to sign an official birthday card, while among Democrats, the Obamas’ birthdays have similarly been celebrated in digital ads.
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But like a kid who brings coconut cake and ice cream for the class but forgets to save himself a slice, a review of Facebook’s Ad Library shows the Biden campaign has run b-day fundraising campaigns for everyone but himself. In August and September it was for former President Barack Obama’s birthday, and during the 2020 campaign, it was for then-candidate Kamala Harris, Obama, and Trump (“Sign Donald Trump's card before midnight and you can add a message sharing exactly what you think about him for his last birthday in the White House before we vote him out,” read one version of copy for the ad). The Democratic Party didn’t run any ads about Biden’s birthday on Meta platforms this year, though it did in 2021.
For some candidates, b-day fundraisers are a lighthearted way to engage small-dollar donors, but the practice is fraught for Biden, who 77% of U.S. adults say is too old to effectively serve another four-year term, according to an Reuters-Ipsos poll released in September (56% said the same of Trump in the poll). So instead, his campaign is having fun with it.
“Turns out on your 146th birthday, you run out of space for candles,” jokes the a caption of an image of POTUS on Instagram with a birthday cake covered in enough candles to burn down 1,000 Britney Spears home gyms (“Hope you had a shovel and a pail of water on hand!” Smokey Bear wrote in the comments). On Threads, the joebiden account added “And to the workers at the birthday candle factory, I hope your union got you overtime.”
It’s how Dark Brandon would have celebrated, and with 1.2 million likes on Instagram, the birthday post is Biden’s first to crack 1 million likes on the platform since a New Year’s post on Jan. 1, 2022. It obviously struck a chord with his supporters.
Democratic donors and bundlers have differing opinions on how Biden’s campaign should handle the president’s age, according to Politico, with some saying Biden should ignore it and focus on his accomplishments and others saying he should go on the offensive. Biden’s strategy has been to joke about it and argue his age is actually a positive. “Call me old, I call it being seasoned,” he said at this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. “You say I am ancient, I say I'm wise.”
As Florida attorney and Biden bundler John Morgan told Politico, you can’t roll back time. “There’s nothing that can be done to make him younger,” Morgan said. “I believe that what’s going to carry the day for Joe Biden is the word ‘wisdom.’ We want wise men. And what I would say to everybody who has a problem with his age, I would just tell them that if you had stopped investing with Warren Buffett when he was 80, you would have missed out on 12 years of record returns.”
As Democrats make a wish and blow out their candles, they’re hoping he’s right.
Here comes the Nikki Haley advertising blitz
Former U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley will be hitting the airwaves in Iowa and New Hampshire hard ahead of the first-in-the-nation caucus and primary.