President-elect Biden

It’s a tossup whether I felt more joy or relief yesterday when Biden went over the top with the Associated Press’s call of Pennsylvania, giving him that state’s 20 electoral votes and putting him over the 270 required for elevation to the Presidency.

I did no street dancing when the decision was announced, but I would have had there been anyone with a boombox outside.

There’s a ton of work to do to repair this country, but Biden’s election (and that of his VP, Kamala Harris, who checks off so many “first” boxes in her new office that I can’t count them all — woman, Black, Asian-American…) is a necessary start. It startles and dismays me that 70 million of my fellow Americans looked at the first Trump term with all its chaos and corruption and said “we’d like four more years of that, please.” We’ll have to see if a new President can heal that divide.

Meanwhile there’s a pandemic running completely out of control in the US and the world. Biden has said that dealing with it is his first priority as President; he plans to convene a task force to advise him as early as Monday Nov. 9.

Trump’s response to the virus killed his chances for re-election, says this preliminary analysis from the Washington Post. I think that’s partially true. The incompetence, the unwillingness to lead by example (refusing to wear a mask), and finally his decision to lie about it (“we’re turning the corner. It’s disappearing.”) showed enough voters that he wasn’t up to the job of keeping Americans safe.

4 Comments

  1. Trumpsky was lucky the virus didn’t kill him (and it still could). For my part, I take some pride in having phone-banked Wisconsin in English and Spanish, though the level of engagement was lower than I had hoped. Most people simply didn’t answer, and I ended up leaving brief voicemails.

  2. Link: Well said. It certainly looked very dark last Tuesday night, but things began to improve when the sun rose the next day, and the skies brightened again and again. More than once tears of joy dotted my face…scooplew

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