Former president Bill Clinton laughs as Vice President Joe Biden speaks during a campaign rally in Ohio in Oct. 29, 2012. | AP Photo Clinton unleashes Democratic dream team A handful of high-wattage surrogates are being dispatched as part of the anti-Trump effort.

SCRANTON, Pa. — Vice President Joe Biden plays the part of Rust Belt ambassador. Elizabeth Warren is the party unifier who speaks to swing state liberals. President Barack Obama stars as the motivator of the base and contraster-in-chief.

The Clinton camp has high expectations — and compartmentalized roles — for these high-wattage surrogates, whom it began rolling out last week when Warren joined Hillary Clinton onstage for the first time at a Cincinnati rally.


Biden, who was set to take the stage here alongside Clinton on Friday morning before the shooting in Dallas led to a postponement of the event, will follow on the heels of Obama’s star turn in Charlotte on Wednesday. The vice president will be serving as a self-styled emissary to the exact kinds of working class, industrial state voters — often union members — that Donald Trump is targeting.

“What they’re doing, and looking where they’re taking each of the surrogates, it’s obviously very targeted in terms of their profiles,” explained Teal Baker, the national director of surrogates for Obama’s 2008 campaign.

The vice president's presence on the trail is the one that’s most telling to Democrats close to the Clinton campaign, who have been waiting for months for the triumvirate of Obama, Biden, and Warren to take to the battleground states and amplify the former secretary of state’s anti-Trump barrage. To them, it signals the arrival of a new phase of the campaign in which the highest-profile Democrats imaginable, likely including former President Bill Clinton and possibly Michelle Obama and Bernie Sanders, join Hillary Clinton in making the case against the presumptive GOP nominee — and for her.

In that respect, the contrast with Trump — still fighting to win over his own party’s leaders — couldn’t be clearer.

“This is the secret weapon that Hillary Clinton has. It’s Democrats’ equivalent of The Avengers. She’s got all of these weapons that she’s going to be able to distribute across the country,” said South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Jaime Harrison. “The Republicans also have a lot of talent, but they don’t want to be associated with Donald Trump."

It’s not as if Clinton can just summon Obama or Biden — for both logistical and protocol reasons. But her position is still unusual, as it’s become exceedingly rare for a popular sitting president, vice president, or former president to campaign for a candidate. Their appearances on the campaign trail are not without risk: surrogates like these could overshadow Clinton if they appear together, as many Democrats believe Obama did in North Carolina. Even then, others insist, The Trump Show will be hard to eclipse.

People close to both Clinton’s camp and the White House don’t expect to see the two of them appearing on the same stage much more, but the candidate’s friends and political allies expect the president to leverage his high popularity with reliable Democratic voters, to drive up blue turnout in the battleground states.

Scheduling his first event in North Carolina — which Obama won in 2008 but narrowly lost in 2012, and a state where the party base is made up largely of a growing African-American population and young college voters — put the president’s role front and center. Obama, after all, is viewed favorably by 50 percent compared to 45 percent who view him unfavorably, according to the Huffington Post Pollster average. Clinton is underwater at 41 percent favorable and 56 percent unfavorable.

The central anti-Trump message Clinton’s forces expect the president to keep pushing is one that he is singularly equipped to deliver: that the real estate developer is unfit to sit in the Oval Office.

“President Obama is going to kind of have the role that Bill Clinton had four years ago, which is President Obama is going to be the sensible adult who’s going to explain [that] case to America in a way that’s harder for the candidate to do because they’re in the battle,” said former Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle.

The contrast with Trump, said Doyle and others, would be clear since Trump has no former Republican presidents by his side, and many of his party’s highest-profile leaders have been hesitant to appear with him or, in some cases, to even endorse his candidacy. While the real estate mogul has brought a handful of potential ticket-mates along with him on the trail in recent days, he also found himself in a series of contentious exchanges with Senate Republicans who oppose him on Capitol Hill on Thursday.

“Obviously the president and vice president aren’t auditioning to be [Clinton’s] vice president. But in a lot of ways Trump is doing the same thing with [Bob] Corker, with Newt [Gingrich],” said Baker. “But it’s an interesting question of party leadership: who wants to be on stage with him?"

Fresh off their tense primary, meanwhile, the only big-name Democrat for whom that’s still a question is Sanders, whose campaign has been locked in talks about endorsing Clinton for days.

Sanders and Clinton are nearing an agreement that would see him endorse her in New Hampshire on Tuesday, according to Democrats involved in the negotiations and planning. But her team has not been operating under the assumption that Sanders will be a regular surrogate, and his own brain trust has for weeks been puzzling through whether he should market himself as an anti-Trump firebrand or something closer to a college campus ambassador for the nominee.

In the meantime, it’s Warren whose campaign debut drew the most attention from progressives. The Clinton camp placed her energetic premiere in Cincinnati, completing its sweep through Ohio’s three biggest cities within two weeks — but also landing the liberal Wall Street antagonist in a blue city in an important county that Obama won twice, providing her with a chance to rile up reliable Democrats.

While Warren, Biden and Obama have occupied the spotlight, some of Clinton’s other big-name backers have kept a relatively low profile in the general election so far, building anticipation for their eventual emergences onto the scene.

Her husband Bill has stuck to fundraising in recent weeks. Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine — a front-runner to be Hillary Clinton’s running mate — has also been raising money for her, including on Thursday night, and appearing on surrogate conference calls. He will make his first public appearance of the general contest with Clinton in his home state next week.

But first will come the Biden event, a much-awaited 2016 opener for the man with a famously complicated relationship with Clinton who declined to run in late 2015. Sending him into Scranton, his hometown (and the city where Clinton’s father grew up), gives Biden the chance to help defend Pennsylvania for Democrats after Trump has promised to put it into play with his appeal to blue collar and middle-class white men whose industries have been hit hard by multinational trade deals.

Defending that terrain is squarely within the Biden wheelhouse, said a handful of Democrats who point to his strong relationships with organized labor and his well-known ability to relate to average voters.

Biden “has a lot of really good roles to play, but I think that’s a very significant one,” said Doyle, whose home state of Wisconsin is a similar target for Trump. “He deservedly has that appeal."

Democratic party leaders are increasingly admitting that they’re nervous about Trump’s ability to make inroads in such communities with his populist appeal. The AFL-CIO, for example, on Wednesday started distributing its first pro-Clinton, anti-Trump direct mail pieces aimed at Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio, Nevada, and Florida.

Painting Trump as a threat to laborers’ way of life, the materials directly echo the message that party officials expect to hear from Biden.

“That’s what he did in ’08 and ’12. He’s reprising that role,” said former Pennsylvania Gov. and Democratic National Committee Chairman Ed Rendell. “Where surrogates have an effect is not necessarily in persuasion. It’s about turnout. Joe can remind the blue collar, white working class guys of all the things that the Republican Party has done to deny them help."