Beyond the asepsis of his campaign, designed and executed remotely to avoid mass events to the point of being almost secret – his team announced the events a few hours before, with attendance limited to a select few -, the candidate’s main weapon Democrat, Joe Biden, in this electoral race have been the forms: always shrouded behind a mask to denounce by contrast Donald Trump’s management of the pandemic.
“There is no single reason to vote for Biden, there are thousands. He empathizes with people, he is not arrogant or pretentious, he knows how to listen and he does not despise anyone like Trump does, ” Diane Smith said Saturday at a Biden car ride in Flint (Michigan) , who had to settle for watching the caravan of candidate among a legion of motorized police, unable to access the parking lot where the eventwas held.
To Michigan, a key state where Trump won in 2016 by a difference of 10,074 votes – the narrowest margin of victory in the entire country – the former vice president traveled this Saturday, accompanied by BarackObama – the great claim of his campaign, the brooch final-, towin over the undecided and secure the support of the African-American community, the majority in the area.
On Monday, the last day of the campaign, he turned his forces into Pennsylvania, another state that can define the result of the polls.
Except for the handful of journalists embedded in the Democratic caravan, the rest have barely managed to find out where the next meeting would take place, only approximately a couple of indicative data (and insufficient, given the distances in the country): the time slot and the state, hopefully the city.
Biden is reproached for not having practically left his home in Wilmington (Delaware) until the final stretch of the campaign, also for his distance from the people, but this way of campaigning has also been his main message: the priority will be to resolve the Covid-19 health crisis, when the country surpasses infection records (more than nine million confirmed, only 90,000 this Friday) and exceeds 230,000 deaths.
Faced with the trail of contagions that Trump has left behind , from the acts at the White House to his wild rallies, Biden’s campaign has been scrupulous to the extreme. “We are going to control covid-19 with a national mandate for a mask, social distancing, testing and tracing,” Biden promised in Flint; “We are going to beat the virus, and the first step to defeating the virus is to beat Donald Trump.” With the seams of the health system ripped open by the emergency, Biden proposes a single federal command, the hiring of 100,000 trackers and the free virus detection tests.
“If Biden wins, he will place Dr. [Anthony] Fauci on the altar he deserves , the insults that Trump has given to this scientific eminence cannot be tolerated,” said Dennis Warson, a former worker at a Detroit auto plant turned into a driver of a car rental platform, on the victim responsible for the fight against the White House virus .
“No one in their right mind would have done the crazy things that Trump has done in the face of the pandemic, that shows that people care very little,” added Warson, with his mask at half mast: the difference between disciplined New York and the laxity of other areas of the country in terms of protection measures jumps dangerously at sight.
The worsening of the pandemic, out of control in the Midwest, and the distant format of the campaign have tarnished the promises of an electoral program that, unlike Trump’s – based on his person and the boasting of his achievements -, it does contain concrete proposals to remedy four years of withdrawal and closure.
The economy, overwhelmed by the impact of the pandemic, and health are two basic pillars of his government plan. In a television ad for the Trump campaign – a string of platitudes sifted by squid ink from ‘fake news’ – an attractive retiree accused Biden of wanting to reform healthcare “to benefit illegal immigrants, which it will clearly be to the detriment of the elderly ”.
But no. Biden only pretends take back parts of Obama’s health care reform, Obamacare , repealed by the outgoing Administration and as a whole anathema to Republicans. The legacy of the first African-American president of the United States lives on in the show that was his number two .its, along with a $ 30 billion package to encourage the development of minorities are anBut no. Biden only pretends take back parts of Obama’s health care reform, Obamacare , repealed by the outgoing Administration and as a whole anathema to Republicans. The legacy of the first African-American president of the United States lives on in the show that was his number two .
Although the Democrat promises to restore US ties with the international community, by reintegrating the country into international organizations and agreements such as the Paris Climate, his firm commitment to local production, with a program called Made in America , is a a sign of economic nationalism that brings him closer to the Indian Narendra Modi or the Turkish Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in their ideological antipodes, and that reformulates the America first that in 2016 brought Trump to the White House.
Taking the economy out of the coma induced by the pandemic, but also transforming it into a green economy, with a clear commitment to renewable energy and the creation of 10 million environmentally sustainable jobs, raise the banner of the fight against climate change that Biden it raises to the horror of its critics, who believe that it will seriously affect the oil industry and doom fracking to irrelevance .
But Biden has never promised to end fossil fuels, only to overcome dependence with a horizon of carbon dioxide neutral emissions in 2050. Biden’s Green New Deal also sounds like Obama.
It is no accident that the Democratic candidate decided on his last day of campaigning to meet with a group of union leaders in Pennsylvania. His toast to the working class, promising to raise the minimum wage to $ 15 an hour (12.6 euros) at the federal level and improve unemployment benefits, along with a $ 30 billion package to encourage the development of minorities are another core measure of the program.
His social drive – a nod to the party’s most left wing, also the youngest and most powerful – looks like a pale mockery of social democracy, though it smacks of something very close to socialism to his rivals.
