June 17 (UPI) — President Joe Biden delivered the first speech of his 2024 presidential reelection campaign to a friendly crowd of union workers gathered in Philadelphia on Saturday.
“Hello, organized labor! Union labor. There’s labor and there’s union labor. Folks, it feels good to be home. I’m Joe Biden. I’m Jill Biden‘s husband and I’m damn proud of it,” the president said at the beginning of his speech, noting that his wife is a “card-carrying member” of her union.
Biden, 80, chose to make Philadelphia his first stop because the battleground city plays an important role in his campaign efforts. The president successfully flipped the city during the 2020 presidential election, winning it from former President Donald Trump — who had been picked by its voters in 2016.
The president called the oration a “speech about the future of this country” and “not a campaign speech” as he reflected on his record of addressing issues that carried over from the Trump administration, such as “broken” supply chains and the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.
He touted his efforts in dropping the unemployment rate in the country to nearly a 50-year low and creating millions of jobs, including 800,000 manufacturing jobs, as well as inflation dropping to “half of what it was a year ago.”
The campaign speech also came after Biden won the endorsement of many of the nation’s most powerful unions, including the AFL-CIO, American Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — many of the members of which were in the crowd Saturday.
“We’re coming together!” Biden said with energy, noting that several environmental organizations have also already given him their endorsements.
He added, “There are a lot of politicians in this country who cannot say the word ‘union.’ You know I’m not one of them. I’m proud to say the word. I’m proud to be most pro-union president in American history.”
“Wall Street didn’t build America. You did,” Biden said, striking a populist message of support for the middle class. “If the investment bankers in this country went on strike tomorrow, nobody would much notice at this point. If this room didn’t show up for work tomorrow, the whole country would come to a grinding halt.”
Biden also got laughs from the crowd for quieting their cheers so he could make the point that it is “time to end the trickle-down economics theory” where “if the wealthy do well, we all do well.”
“We decided to replace this theory with what the press is now calling ‘Bidenomics.’ I don’t know what the hell that is, but it’s working,” Biden said. “It’s about building the economy from the bottom up and the middle out, not the top down. Because when the middle class does well, everybody does well.”
In his speech, Biden also hit out at his predecessor and Republican frontrunner, without referring to Trump by name, for his stances on foreign policy and making infrastructure improvements a “punch line.”
Before his speech, Biden took a helicopter tour to view the damage from the collapsed section of the Interstate 95 in Philadelphia, which Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said Saturday will reopen to traffic within two weeks.
“Our allies in Europe and around the world heard the last president saying our foreign policy was ‘America First’ and for the first time since World War II, our friends began to wonder if the United States could be relied on,” Biden said.
“Now, look at where we are today. We’ve united NATO in a way that it has never been united before.”