Former Vice President Joe Biden Announces 2020 Presidential Run
Former vice president Joe Biden has announced he is running for president in 2020, after much anticipation over whether he would decide to throw his hat in the ring. The field of now 20 Democratic candidates includes Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, and Kirsten Gillibrand and South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg. Biden released an announcement video with a message on Twitter: “The core values of this nation . . . our standing in the world . . . our very democracy . . . everything that has made America—America—is at stake. That’s why today I’m announcing my candidacy for president of the United States.”
In the video announcement, Biden recounts both the drafting of the Declaration of Independence by Charlottesville, Virginia, resident Thomas Jefferson and the tragic events of the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in that city, when activist Heather Heyer was murdered. He directly connects his reasons for running to Donald Trump’s now-infamous reaction to Heyer’s death: “He said there were quote some very fine people on both sides,” Biden said. “With those words, the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it. And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.”
Biden is 76 years old; he ran for president as a Democrat in both 1988 and 2008, and he served as vice president to Barack Obama for two terms. Before that, he represented Delaware in the Senate from 1973 to 2009 and chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Anita Hill hearings. Later on Thursday, he will attend a fund-raiser in Philadelphia before appearing on The View on Friday in his first public appearance since the announcement.
