With just as much populist outrage, he runs on Trump's protectionism and anti-globalism.
On his first trip to Iowa in his third bid for the presidency, Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Tuesday accused President Trump of coddling white supremacists, called former President Barack Obama “an extraordinary man” and vowed fidelity to longstanding Democratic priorities like Medicare and increasing the minimum wage.
He ignored his rivals for the Democratic nomination completely, not even hinting at any policy differences.
Senator Bernie Sanders, Mr. Biden’s closest competition in the polls, is taking a very different approach.
Mr. Sanders went on CNN on Monday night to attack Mr. Biden for his history of supporting free trade measures, a deeply divisive issue in the party.
“I helped lead the fight against Nafta, he voted for Nafta,” Mr. Sanders said, before ticking off other trade pacts that he opposed and Mr. Biden backed.
For good measure, Mr. Sanders added, “I voted against the war in Iraq, he voted for it.”
It was Mr. Sanders’s third broadside against Mr. Biden since he entered the race last week — and it marked a preview of the coming clash between the two septuagenarians that is likely to shape the early contours of the primary.
The competing strategies — Mr. Sanders targeting Mr. Biden while Mr. Biden wraps himself in the Obama legacy and excoriates Mr. Trump — illustrate the starkly different wagers the two candidates are making in the outset of the 2020 contest.
Mr. Biden’s bet is that his party’s rank-and-file consider the Obama years as a success and are animated chiefly by ejecting Mr. Trump.
With a substantial lead in early polls, Mr. Biden is trying to remain above the intraparty fray, promising a new era of good feeling after the Trump interregnum and invoking his White House experience at every turn.
“We got plenty of time to respond, I’m not going to get in a debate with my colleagues here,” Mr. Biden said Tuesday at an ice cream shop in eastern Iowa, gripping a chocolate-and-vanilla-swirl cone.
He declined to directly answer Mr. Sanders’s critique, but did call himself “a fair trader” and, notably, said he did not regret his vote for Nafta as a senator.
Later, at a rally in Dubuque, the former vice president joked that there were scant policy differences among the large field of Democratic candidates.
“We agree on basically everything, all of us running — all 400 of us.”
Oooooh, there's a big Pinnochio.
Mr. Sanders, the leader in early polls until Mr. Biden joined the race, feels less urgency to unify the country or even the Democratic Party and has taken a far more aggressive posture toward the front-runner than any other contender.
In targeting the former vice president, he is hoping to elevate himself as the leading progressive alternative in a 20-person field filled with candidates hungry for attention.
Mr. Sanders is running on the assumption that Democratic voters not only want to defeat Mr. Trump but also seek to shed the incremental, within-the-system politics of Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden as well as Bill and Hillary Clinton.
He never wants to recall that Hillary got the suffrage of nearly 4 million more Democratic primary voters than he did.
He never wants to recall that just as he isn't really a Democrat and openly despises the party the feeling is entirely mutual and Democrats who actually are Democrats don't want him, his socialism, or his foolish protectionism.
Maybe he didn't see this poll.
It would have made the matter clear as a bell.
A new national poll of Democratic primary voters helps illustrate why Mr. Sanders is so eager to pick a fight with Mr. Biden:
The former vice president has gained ground since entering the race and enjoys the support of 39 percent of his party’s voters while Mr. Sanders is in second place with 15 percent.
CNN
Former Vice President Joe Biden's announcement of a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination earned him an 11-point polling bounce, leaving him head and shoulders above the rest of the Democratic candidates.
A new CNN poll conducted by SSRS after Biden's announcement on Thursday shows 39% of voters who are Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents saying he is their top choice for the nomination, up from 28% who said the same in March.
That puts Biden more than 20 points ahead of his nearest competitor, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont -- who holds 15% support in the poll -- and roughly 30 points ahead of the next strongest candidate, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (8%).
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