He was the favorite of the Democratic Party elite. He had been around for decades, knew everyone who was anyone, was a regular habitué of Sunday talk shows and appeared to be the safest choice to take on President Donald J. Trump.
Four years later, President Biden is now aggressively attacking the establishment that once formed the core of his support, deriding the “elites,” the pollsters, the pundits, the donors and balky members of his party while making himself out to be the victim of unfair persecution. “I don’t care what those big names think,” he declared this week.
As he faces perhaps the most perilous moment of his political career, Mr. Biden has switched from defense to offense, taking a page out of his predecessor’s playbook to try to quash an internal uprising over his age and capacity. Rather than just try to show that he is up to the job, Mr. Biden has opted to push back against those who say he is not. Reassurance did not work. But recriminations might.
“He has to show he’s a fighter; that’s critical,” said Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster who worked on Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns.
“They see him as weak, not strong, which is connected to being too old,” Mr. Belcher said, referring to voters. He added, “In an odd way, this fight might help him.”
But the approach has rubbed some of the president’s allies the wrong way. Paul Begala, a longtime party strategist and former adviser to President Bill Clinton who calls himself “a Biden Democrat,” expressed frustration on Tuesday that the president and his team had gone after Democrats like David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Mr. Obama, who have been outspoken about their concerns about the president.
“In my list of villains, Donald Trump is a bigger villain than David Axelrod, OK?” Mr. Begala said on CNN. “I’m really tired of them attacking Democrats of good faith who are really worried that Biden will cost us the House, the Senate and the White House. I guess I’d give them that advice: If you want to unite your party, try attacking Trump a little bit instead of these mythical Democratic elites.”
Former Representative Tom Malinowski of New Jersey, who has been staying in touch with his former House colleagues, said the debate about Mr. Biden’s future should be conducted in “a thoughtful, respectful” way. Once the decision was made, he said, Democrats needed to be unified to stop “a liar, dictator-loving sociopath” from becoming president.
“I get what he’s doing,” Mr. Malinowski said of Mr. Biden. “Some of the discourse you see online is not very thoughtful or respectful. It obviously needs to be totally respectful of him but also of those in the party who disagree about the best way to protect his legacy.”
Mr. Biden came out swinging this week after failing to convince many Democrats that he should stay in the race given his confused performance at the June 27 debate with Mr. Trump. He seemed particularly frustrated that no one was taking his insistence that he is remaining a candidate as the final word on the matter.
His letter to congressional Democrats and a phone call into “Morning Joe” on MSNBC on Monday were meant to put an end to the internal debate over his future and to force the party to accept that he will still be their nominee. It seemed to slow the erosion for a while, heartening Mr. Biden’s advisers.
But it did not end the matter. Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the former speaker and one of Mr. Biden’s most important Democratic allies, went on the same television show on Wednesday morning and spoke as if she did not consider Mr. Biden’s statement to be definitive. “It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run,” she said. “We’re all encouraging him to make that decision. Because time is running short.”
The actor George Clooney, weighed in with an opinion essay in The New York Times on Wednesday, just weeks after hosting a lavish, record-setting fund-raiser for the president in Los Angeles.
“It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010,” Mr. Clooney wrote. “He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”
Mr. Biden’s feisty tone this week was part instinct and part strategy. A graduate of the University of Delaware and Syracuse University’s law school, Mr. Biden has long had a chip on his shoulder about Ivy Leaguers and others he perceives to be elite, even as he assiduously worked for decades to be part of their club in Washington.
Even in the past three and a half years, sitting in the Oval Office, he has nursed resentments toward those he believed underestimated him. He is still upset at newspapers that endorsed rivals during the 2020 Democratic primaries and commentators who doubted his ability to pass major bills that, in many cases, he did eventually sign into law.
Encouraged by his staff, Mr. Biden has convinced himself that the prognosticators were wrong about elections in 2020, 2022 and 2023, and therefore they are wrong again when they predict disaster for a Biden-led ticket this fall.
That he chose to go on “Morning Joe” to criticize elites, of course, carried its own irony, one that he seemed to recognize in the middle of his denunciation. “I’m getting so frustrated by the elites — now I’m not talking about you guys — the elites in the party, ‘Oh, they know so much more,’” he said.
Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said Mr. Biden’s combativeness was second nature. “It really, truly is who he is, at his core, to fight — to fight not just for himself but what he believes in,” she told a briefing. “And he has seen this over and over again: People count him out. People say he’s not going to win. People say, you know, all of the negative things that they want to put at his feet, and he proves them wrong over and over again.”
His tone has been reflected, even previewed, by his campaign operation, which from the early days in the debate backlash began blitzing out emails and fund-raising appeals assailing the Democratic “bed-wetting brigade” and the various left-leaning columnists and editorialists who have called for him to drop out.
“President Biden and his team are exhibiting the only posture that they can if he’s to stay in this race — which is vehement, absolute statements about where the campaign stands,” said Bill Burton, a Democratic strategist and former deputy press secretary to Mr. Obama. “Otherwise, the media will look at any half-step backward as a signal that the whole thing is done.”
One of the problems for Mr. Biden is that the doubts about his continued candidacy are not, in fact, only held by elites, pundits and donors. In fact, in interviews and surveys, many Democratic voters have made abundantly clear that they share the uncertainty about Mr. Biden’s ability to beat Mr. Trump in the fall, much less serve another four years as president until the age of 86.
A poll by The New York Times and Siena College after the debate found Democratic voters split right down the middle, with 48 percent saying Mr. Biden should stay in the race and 47 percent saying they would prefer another candidate. And some party figures said the president needs to respect those voters as well.
“President Biden would surely agree that unity is not something you just declare,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which has worked closely with the White House on economic messaging.
“Lots of everyday voters and down-ballot Democrats who need to win for the sake of democracy still want to see this president vigorously fight Trump and Project 2025,” he added. “Biden should relish the challenge — saying ‘watch me,’ not ‘shame on you’ or ‘this conversation is done.’”
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