joe biden
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With performances by Lizzo, Queen Latifah, Ben Platt and Cynthia Erivo, plus appearances by former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, a fundraiser for Joe Biden at Radio City Music Hall on Thursday (Mar. 28) in New York could jump-start the incumbent’s so-far minimal public support from Democratic-leaning music stars for the upcoming 2024 presidential election.
“You’ll see more of that in the next couple of months,” predicts Hilary Rosen, former head of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and a longtime Democratic-leaning political analyst, referring to support from artists for the Biden campaign.
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It’s still early in the presidential campaign, but at this point, Biden’s endorsements from top music stars are a shadow of those he received in 2020, including from Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Madonna, Ariana Grande, Cher and Melissa Etheridge. James Taylor and Lenny Kravitz performed at late-2023 fundraisers for the incumbent president, but beyond that, artists have mostly been silent.
That’s partially by design. Campaign representatives say the most impactful time for celebrity endorsements is late summer and fall, when more voters are paying attention to the election. A prime example of this timing was Bruce Springsteen‘s narration of an ad about Biden’s hometown, Scranton, Pa., that came out on Halloween 2020. “When it comes to celebrities, as you get closer to the election, more [of them] get engaged,” says Chris Korge, national finance chairman for the Biden Victory Fund. “Some help us with fundraising, others help us with grassroots and campaign events.”
But several Democratic supporters in the music business say they’re concerned about the lack of stars’ involvement in the election thus far. Part of that has to do with an uneventful primary season, with little rivalry within the candidates’ parties — President Obama drew early support from artists and celebrities when he was battling Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination in 2008, but not as much in 2012 when he was an incumbent running essentially unopposed. “I would not be surprised [by] a very high level of engagement as time goes on,” says Cliff Chenfeld, who founded Razor & Tie Records and created Kidz Bop and hosts events for Democratic candidates. “But I’ve seen two or three shows a week this year and I have yet to hear one artist mention one word about anything political or topical. I’ve heard somebody say, ‘Wow, we could be in for a tough year,’ but I haven’t really heard anything beyond that.”
In 2020, as was the case with Obama in 2008, Biden was the “change” candidate — an alternative to a Republican president after years of policies that were largely unpopular among young voters, on topics ranging from climate change to LGBTQ rights. Due to a primary battle that year with a more progressive rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Biden had to wait a few months for artists to support his candidacy. As late as August of that year, John Legend, Andra Day and Dave Matthews were among his few prominent music-star supporters.
Eventually, artists lined up to support Biden in 2020, but the president faces stronger headwinds among progressive artists and young voters in 2024, due in part to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. “I understand the frustration. He’s older, he hasn’t gotten any more inspiring and the idea that [he’ll be] a transitional candidate to bridge the gap from one generation to the next, that’s obviously not ringing true,” says Jordan Kurland, manager for Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service who has organized top artists on behalf of Democratic candidates. “But I’m voting for him because he’s our candidate, and obviously I’m going to choose democracy over what comes next under Trump. And I do think [Biden] has done a good job.”
Some Democrats in the music business say both of Biden’s campaigns, unlike Obama’s in 2008 and 2012, haven’t spent much time on outreach to music stars and their representatives. But they encourage the campaign to deploy artists with dependable fan bases in swing states from Pennsylvania to Arizona as quickly as possible. A music-business source who worked with the Biden campaign in 2020 on planning events and generating artist support came away frustrated: Biden campaign reps, he says, were “not enthusiastic four years ago, I can tell you that much. I have no reason to think they’re going to be more enthusiastic now.” The source adds that he wishes this year’s Biden campaign was “further ahead” in working with politically engaged artists.
Biden’s campaign plans to employ a celebrity-heavy “surrogate” program to oversee its artist outreach, as it did in 2020 when Olympic figure-skating champion Michelle Kwan served as director. Although that program has yet to kick in, many in the music business are confident the campaign won’t need to take elaborate measures to garner artist support. “You always hear about malaise and unenthusiasm,” says Peter Shapiro, a New York concert promoter and 20-year board member for Headcount, a nonpartisan group that has registered 1 million voters since 2004. “We always see it ramp up. People will realize the choices in front of them are significant.”
Several Biden supporters in the music business say that even if Democratic-leaning artists are hesitant to wholeheartedly endorse the president, they can speak in favor of down-ballot candidates or issues like abortion or climate change. Or they can criticize former President Donald Trump, who has artist supporters of his own, including conservative musicians Kid Rock and Jason Aldean.
Will any of it matter? In 2016, Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Springsteen, Katy Perry and other music stars performed at Hillary Clinton rallies days before the election, and she lost. “Will Taylor Swift save Joe Biden? Will she be that magic bullet that will save him from being six points down from Donald Trump?” Rosen asks facetiously.
“Let’s be realistic — most artists are not going to change a single person’s vote,” Rosen adds. “What they do is draw a crowd for voter registration and raising money. That’s what all campaigns want them for.”
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Donald Trump is sharing his thoughts on who Taylor Swift should support in the upcoming 2024 presidential election.
The former commander-in-chief took to Truth Social ahead of Super Bowl LVIII on Sunday (Feb. 11) to express his arguments about why the pop superstar should support him as he potentially faces off against Joe Biden for president this November.
“I signed and was responsible for the Music Modernization Act for Taylor Swift and all other Musical Artists,” Trump began his post. “Joe Biden didn’t do anything for Taylor, and never will. There’s no way she could endorse Crooked Joe Biden, the worst and most corrupt President in the History of our Country, and be disloyal to the man who made her so much money.”
In 2018, then-President Trump signed into law the MMA, which alters the way songwriters and music publishers are paid certain royalties.
“The Music Modernization Act closes loopholes in our digital royalties laws to ensure that songwriters, artists and producers receive fair payment for licensing of music,” Trump said at the time of signing. “I’ve been reading about this for many years and never thought I’d be involved in it, but I got involved in it. They were treated very unfairly. They’re not going to be treated unfairly anymore.”
In his Truth Social post on Sunday, Trump also offered some complimentary words for Swift’s boyfriend, Travis Kelce, who’s facing off against the San Francisco 49ers at the 2024 Super Bowl at Las Vegas’ Allegiant Stadium.
“Besides that, I like her boyfriend, Travis, even though he may be a Liberal, and probably can’t stand me!”
In October 2020, Swift revealed through Twitter (now X) that she would be voting for Biden for president in the U.S. general election. At the time, the singer-songwriter also expressed her opposition of Trump, including his comments on Black Lives Matter protestors in Minnesota and his handling of funding for the U.S. Postal Service.
“The change we need most is to elect a president who recognizes that people of color deserve to feel safe and represented, that women deserve the right to choose what happens to their bodies, and that the LGBTQIA+ community deserves to be acknowledged and included,” Swift told V Magazine for the publication’s “The Thought Leaders Issue.”
“Everyone deserves a government that takes global health risks seriously and puts the lives of its people first. The only way we can begin to make things better is to choose leaders who are willing to face these issues and find ways to work through them.”
Earlier this year, Trump offered his thoughts on Swift and Kelce’s rumored romance. During an interview with the Daily Caller, the former president was asked for his take on the possible romance between the pop superstar and Kansas City Chiefs tight end.
“I wish the best for both of them. I hope they enjoy their life, maybe together, maybe not — most likely not,” Trump said during the sit-down, which was published Sept. 29.
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We’re still more than a year out from the 2024 U.S. presidential election, but one particularly unlikely name seems to have The View co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin’s vote. During a heated Wednesday morning (Sept. 20) roundtable discussion about the imminent government shutdown, Griffin controversially claimed that Taylor Swift is doing more for the economy than […]
President Joe Biden said Friday that new commitments by Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and other companies that are leading the development of artificial intelligence technology to meet a set of AI safeguards brokered by his White House are an important step toward managing the “enormous” promise and risks posed by the technology.
Biden announced that his administration has secured voluntary commitments from seven U.S. companies meant to ensure their AI products are safe before they release them. Some of the commitments call for third-party oversight of the workings of commercial AI systems, though they don’t detail who will audit the technology or hold the companies accountable.
“We must be clear eyed and vigilant about the threats emerging technologies can pose,” Biden said, adding that the companies have a “fundamental obligation” to ensure their products are safe.
“Social media has shown us the harm that powerful technology can do without the right safeguards in place,” Biden added. “These commitments are a promising step, but we have a lot more work to do together.”
A surge of commercial investment in generative AI tools that can write convincingly human-like text and churn out new images and other media has brought public fascination as well as concern about their ability to trick people and spread disinformation, among other dangers.
The four tech giants, along with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and startups Anthropic and Inflection, have committed to security testing “carried out in part by independent experts” to guard against major risks, such as to biosecurity and cybersecurity, the White House said in a statement.
That testing will also examine the potential for societal harms, such as bias and discrimination, and more theoretical dangers about advanced AI systems that could gain control of physical systems or “self-replicate” by making copies of themselves.
The companies have also committed to methods for reporting vulnerabilities to their systems and to using digital watermarking to help distinguish between real and AI-generated images known as deepfakes.
They will also publicly report flaws and risks in their technology, including effects on fairness and bias, the White House said.
The voluntary commitments are meant to be an immediate way of addressing risks ahead of a longer-term push to get Congress to pass laws regulating the technology. Company executives plan to gather with Biden at the White House on Friday as they pledge to follow the standards.
Some advocates for AI regulations said Biden’s move is a start but more needs to be done to hold the companies and their products accountable.
“A closed-door deliberation with corporate actors resulting in voluntary safeguards isn’t enough,” said Amba Kak, executive director of the AI Now Institute. “We need a much more wide-ranging public deliberation, and that’s going to bring up issues that companies almost certainly won’t voluntarily commit to because it would lead to substantively different results, ones that may more directly impact their business models.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has said he will introduce legislation to regulate AI. He said in a statement that he will work closely with the Biden administration “and our bipartisan colleagues” to build upon the pledges made Friday.
A number of technology executives have called for regulation, and several went to the White House in May to speak with Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and other officials.
Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a blog post Friday that his company is making some commitments that go beyond the White House pledge, including support for regulation that would create a “licensing regime for highly capable models.”
But some experts and upstart competitors worry that the type of regulation being floated could be a boon for deep-pocketed first-movers led by OpenAI, Google and Microsoft as smaller players are elbowed out by the high cost of making their AI systems known as large language models adhere to regulatory strictures.
The White House pledge notes that it mostly only applies to models that “are overall more powerful than the current industry frontier,” set by currently available models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 and image generator DALL-E 2 and similar releases from Anthropic, Google and Amazon.
A number of countries have been looking at ways to regulate AI, including European Union lawmakers who have been negotiating sweeping AI rules for the 27-nation bloc that could restrict applications deemed to have the highest risks.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres recently said the United Nations is “the ideal place” to adopt global standards and appointed a board that will report back on options for global AI governance by the end of the year.
Guterres also said he welcomed calls from some countries for the creation of a new U.N. body to support global efforts to govern AI, inspired by such models as the International Atomic Energy Agency or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The White House said Friday that it has already consulted on the voluntary commitments with a number of countries.
The pledge is heavily focused on safety risks but doesn’t address other worries about the latest AI technology, including the effect on jobs and market competition, the environmental resources required to build the models, and copyright concerns about the writings, art and other human handiwork being used to teach AI systems how to produce human-like content.
Last week, OpenAI and The Associated Press announced a deal for the AI company to license AP’s archive of news stories. The amount it will pay for that content was not disclosed.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is hosting executives from Live Nation, Airbnb and other companies at the White House on Thursday to highlight his administration’s push to end so-called junk fees that surprise consumers. Biden prioritized the effort to combat surprise or undisclosed fees in his State of the Union address and has called […]
The White House announced on Wednesday (June 7) that President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden will be hosting a Juneteenth concert on the South Lawn on June 13. The event comes two years after Biden signed a bipartisan legislation establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday. Juneteenth, celebrated on June 19 annually, commemorates the […]
The White House announced on Thursday (April 13) that President Joe Biden has tapped Lady Gaga to co-chair his Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.
Mother Monster will share her position as co-chair of the committee with Hollywood producer and Oscar winner Bruce Cohen, while the likes of Kerry Washington, Jon Batiste, George Clooney, Jennifer Garner, Troy Kotsur, Shonda Rhimes, Marta Kauffman and more will join them as committee members.
“Welcome newly appointed members of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, led by @BruceCohen83 and @ladygaga!” the official committee Twitter account shared. “We look forward to partnering to positively impact the arts, libraries, museums, and humanities work across the country.”
Gaga retweeted the news of her appointment, writing, “Thank you @POTUS @PCAHgov,” and her Little Monsters’ reactions ranged from patriotic and proud to hilariously confused. “President Stefani Germanotta,” one tweeted alongside a photo of the singer making her grand entrance at President Biden’s inauguration, where she sang the national anthem. Meanwhile, another gleefully admitted, “I don’t know what this means but slay.”
The PCAH was created by executive order in 1982 and, according to a release, functions to “advise the President on cultural policy” in order to “enhance federal support for the arts, humanities, and museum and library services.”
Read the announcement from the White House and Gaga’s reaction below.
Welcome newly appointed members of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, led by @BruceCohen83 and @ladygaga! We look forward to partnering to positively impact the arts, libraries, museums, and humanities work across the country. https://t.co/bbhZje2Rwm— President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities (@PCAHgov) April 13, 2023