
Help Raphael Warnock from afar: Check. Earn some union credibility: Also check.
President Joe Biden returned to Boston on Friday for a whirlwind afternoon that began with a Prince William meeting and ended with a fundraiser for the vulnerable Democratic senator ahead of Tuesday’s Georgia runoff election.
But it was the union-sponsored phone bank that underscored the dual purposes of Biden’s hastily thrown-together trip — finding a safe way to help Warnock and showing off his union support hours after he signed a controversial bill averting a freight rail workers’ strike.
A grinning Biden was met with a standing ovation and a “we love you, Joe” at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 103 in Dorchester as photographers clicked away. A few union members wore “IBEW FOR JOE” t-shirts. A plastic bag full of buttons with Biden’s name on them sat on a table by the door.
President Joe Biden greets people as he visits a phone bank at
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 103, Dec. 2, 2022,
in Boston.
Biden has no plans to visit Georgia ahead of Tuesday. Instead, by campaigning for Warnock some 1,000 miles away, the president is continuing his successful midterm strategy of helping from a distance. Biden aides told the Associated Press that Warnock’s campaign requested the Boston trip. And deep-pocketed Massachusetts is as good a place as any to help replenish the coffers Senate Democrats’ campaign arm drained by pouring millions into Warnock’s runoff election against Republican Herschel Walker.
Yet Biden drew the most attention Friday for his meeting with the Prince of Wales at the John F. Kennedy Library for a mostly private meeting in which the two took in the “spectacular” skyline view and shared “warm memories” of the late Queen Elizabeth II, according to pool reports.
The two also share an affinity for the late president. The British royals were concluding a three-day tour of Boston on Friday that culminated in their Earthshot climate innovator prize awards — an initiative named after Kennedy’s famed “moonshot” speech. Biden delivered remarks on his administration’s similarly named cancer moonshot initiative during a visit to the library in September.