I’ve always been a fan of Joe Biden. I admire his authorship of the Violence Against Women Act and his longstanding gravitas as a public servant for decades.

I even contributed to the Draft Biden PAC back in 2015 in hopes that the straight talker from Scranton would enter the race for the White House.

I was, indeed, “Ridin’ With Biden” as they say.

ARI FLEISCHER: JOE BIDEN WILL HAVE TO SACRIFICE AUTHENTICITY FOR POLITICAL CORRECTNESS IN THIS CAMPAIGN

I truly believe that 2016 was Joe Biden’s moment to run for president. Yes, he had run unsuccessfully twice before. And, yes, sitting vice presidents are not usually successful in their bid for the top job. But, I saw Joe Biden as the one person who could have taken on Donald Trump four years ago.

Biden had some access to the Obama infrastructure, and more importantly, he had the authenticity to connect with Blue Collar voters in the industrial Midwest. Yet, Biden passed on running for president in 2016, deferring to the perceived inevitability of Hillary Clinton’s nomination.

This week, Biden is back, officially launching his presidential campaign after months of speculation. Even before he announced, Biden was the target of attacks from fellow Democrats on everything from being an old, white male to his treatment of Anita Hill as chair of the Senate Judiciary committee. There were also accusations by some Democrats who claimed Biden made them feel uncomfortable by encroaching on their personal space. In spite of all of this criticism from inside his own party, Biden still leads in a number of polls and is widely seen as the candidate with the best shot of taking back the White House.

Biden’s message in his campaign announcement video Thursday was clear: this election is about the soul of our nation. It is a choice between hope and fear, good and evil.

This approach makes some sense as it paints the 2020 race as bigger than the candidates themselves. Biden did not talk about his past record in government. He also did not offer policy solutions for the future. Instead, Biden made his candidacy about rejecting Trump’s America.

The insinuation was that another four years of Donald Trump would do irreparable damage to our nation’s core values. The latent message seemed to suggest that if Trump stays in the White House, we are doomed to be a nation that accepts racism and bigotry, doubts our institutions of government and the press, rebukes our historic global allies and attempts to ignore the rule of law if it is politically expedient or personally beneficial. While Biden did not explicitly say these all of these things in his video, the message seemed to permeate the underlying premise.

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Herein lies the problem with this bold strategy. This message, by deduction, basically says to Trump supporters, “Hey, since you support Trump you are on the side of evil. You are embracing these bigoted policies. You are just as bad as I am saying Trump is.” Again, Biden did not explicitly say this in the same kind of way Hillary Clinton called Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables.” But, the offensive insinuation is there, leaving me to wonder how Joe Biden in 2020 can win over Americans who voted for Trump in 2016.

Biden should focus more on how he intends to put his values of inclusiveness and opportunity into policy solutions rather than building his campaign’s foundation on simply rejecting Donald Trump.