Ready, Set, Joe! Biden to run

Veteran politician would be 78 when sworn in, the oldest White House occupant ever.

Former US Vice-President Joe Biden is well-known, respected and generally liked. But these favorable characteristics are undercut by his seeming inability to stay on message and his well-known penchant for making awkward comments.

Biden, 76, will enter the race for the Democratic Party's nomination for president on Thursday with the release of a video, and then travel to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Monday for his first campaign event.

"Can you change at age 76?" Jonathan Zogby, CEO of Zogby Analytics, a polling and market research company in Utica, New York, said to China Daily. "He will have to be 'Scranton Joe 2.0', stay on message, not be combative and show humility. That's the challenge."

Biden makes much of growing up in a working-class family in Scranton, Pennsylvania, but the campaign image is belied by his career as a professional politician who spent most of his adult life in Washington. At 29, Biden was elected US senator from Delaware and served from 1973 to 2009. Barack Obama selected Biden as his vice-president and he held that job from 2009 to 2017.

If elected, Biden would be 78 when sworn in as president — the oldest person to ever hold the office. Former President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, was 69 when he assumed office in 1981 and many feared he was too old for the job. However, Biden's age may not be a factor in view of Reagan's two terms as president, and President Donald Trump's current age, 72.

"Biden's strengths are his experience, name recognition and high favorability ratings," Zogby said. "I believe Biden will appeal to a broader base than other Democratic candidates and has the best chance of winning back blue-collar voters who supported Trump in 2016. (Vermont Senator Bernie) Sanders fires up progressives on the East and West coasts, but I don't think his brand of socialism will appeal to voters in the Midwest and South."

Zogby said many candidates for the Democratic nomination talk about imposing higher taxes on millionaires, regulating corporations, forgiving student loans, making reparations to the descendants of slaves and imposing strict environmental regulations. These issues are of little interest to swing voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin who tipped the 2016 election to Trump, he said, adding that Biden should counter with an economic message.

But that tactic could be risky, given the strong economy sparked by Trump's tax cuts, low unemployment, including among blacks and Hispanics, renegotiated trade deals with Mexico and Canada, as well as the prospect of a trade deal with China. A strong economy and robust stock market benefit Trump, Zogby said.

It's unclear if Biden can appeal to millennials, who tell pollsters they want a younger candidate with "progressive" views. The paradox is that Bernie Sanders, 77, now leads Biden 30 percent to 18 percent among voters in New Hampshire, site of the first primary election in February 2020, the University of New Hampshire's Granite State poll shows.

"The election is a long way off," Andrew Smith director of the University of New Hampshire's survey center and a professor of political science, told China Daily. "Polls are not predictive. In 2015, Sanders was a blip and won the [New Hampshire] Democratic primary with 60 percent of the vote. Biden and Sanders are leading now simply because they're best known."

Biden leads all Democratic candidates in most nationwide polls, but the results mean little because the primaries are conducted by individual states and the first debate will not be held until June.

Biden is known for his gaffes, and this may undercut his appeal.

Referring to Obama after being selected as his running mate, Biden said: "I mean, you've got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate, bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man."

During Biden's first presidential run, he argued with a voter in New Hampshire about who had the higher IQ. Biden, sometimes derided as "Slow Joe", graduated near the bottom of his class as Syracuse University Law School, a second-tier school.

In the past, Biden has touched and nuzzled women at public events and many were visibility uncomfortable. Biden joked about it when he should have stated such behavior is no longer acceptable and apologized, Zogby said.

Biden has been criticized for the way he handled Anita Hill's sexual harassment allegations against Clarence Thomas during Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1991. Critics slammed Biden for failing to blunt attacks on Hill's credibility and for not calling witnesses to support her.

Biden's personal life has been difficult. His son, Beau, died of brain cancer in 2015 at age 46. In 1972, Biden's first wife, Nelia, and young daughter, Naomi, were killed in a car crash.

Biden sought the Democratic nomination in 1988 and 2008 without winning a single delegate.