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Biden invokes history at campaign rally in Charleston [1]
['Abraham Kenmore', 'More From Author', '- January']
Date: 2024-01-08
CHARLESTON, S.C. — At a historic church in Charleston on Monday, President Joe Biden, campaigning for a second four-year term, invoked history as his theme.
“That’s the America we’re building, instead of erasing history we’re making history,” he told an audience of several hundred supporters at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Emanuel is the oldest African Methodist Episcopal church in the South, often known as Mother Emanuel. In 2015, an avowed white supremacist killed nine Black worshipers at the church. That act of racist violence formed the opening of Biden’s remarks, before he turned to what he saw as future threats in the erasure of history, including the claim by former President Donald Trump that the 2020 election had been stolen.
“Losers are taught to concede when they lose — and he is a loser,” Biden said of the former president.
Biden made clear who he credited for the outcome of the 2020 election — the people before him.
“I’m here to speak to another truth,” he said. “It’s because of this congregation, the Black community of South Carolina and, not an exaggeration, Jim Clyburn, that I stand here today as your president.”
In 2020, South Carolina gave then-candidate Biden a significant win in the Democratic primary following a key endorsement by U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn. Until then, Biden had trailed with a fourth-place finish in Iowa and fifth-place finish in New Hampshire.
Clyburn opened for Biden at Monday’s event, listing a series of policies from the administration — judicial appointments of women of color, student debt relief, and efforts to reduce medication prices, among others — as victories.
Now the Palmetto State is leading the Democratic Party, after the party moved South Carolina — which has a much larger Black population than either Iowa or New Hampshire — to the first-in-the-nation contest. (New Hampshire is still technically holding an earlier, unauthorized primary on Jan 23, which Biden refused to register for.) Recent national polls show a big drop in enthusiasm for Biden among Black voters.
The speech largely centered around domestic policies, but several minutes in some attendees stood up and began chanting “ceasefire now,” calling for Biden to support a full ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas.
“I understand your passion,” Biden said as the protesters were led out of the event as other attendees began chanting “four more years” over the protestors.
Dozens of protesters held a rally calling for a ceasefire in a park near the church.
Marcus McDonald, 27, a lead organizer with Charleston Black Lives Matter, said Emanuel is his family’s church.
“We find it so disrespectful that President Biden has come to the place of a massacre while actively benefiting and promoting a genocide and a massacre in Gaza,” McDonald said at the rally following Biden’s speech.
The president’s visit follows one by Vice President Kamala Harris on Saturday, when she spoke to the annual retreat of the 7th Episcopal District African Methodist Episcopal Church Women’s Missionary Society.
On Saturday, the state party is starting a get-out-the-vote bus tour, and two days later Harris will speak at the Statehouse for the NAACP’s annual King Day at the Dome for Martin Luther King Jr. event.
Even Democratic leadership acknowledges that South Carolina is likely to vote for a Republican in the general presidential election. And Biden will only be facing two long-shot candidates: U.S. Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota and author Marianne Williamson. A recent poll puts his support among Democratic primary voters at 69%.
But the party is still hiring a number of staffers and a “six figure” investment ahead of the primary. This includes six regional directors, a campus organizer, and 12 event coordinators who will work through mid-February, as well as 30 workers hired specifically for the week before the primary to encourage people to vote.
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