The Democratic candidate ran a gray campaign, trying to position himself as the opposite of the current president • His opponents claim he is in decline, but the career peak may even be ahead of him
If it turns out that Joe Biden fulfilled the polls' predictions and won the US presidential election, then he owes his victory first to one man. And no, this is not former President Barack Obama or even President Trump. This is actually a person named most Israelis - and even Americans Many - Never Heard: Congressman Jim Claiborne.
Photo: Reuters
Hard to believe, but less than a year ago the former vice president's campaign was on the boards.
It was the beginning of February, and after the first 3 fights against a tangle of Democratic candidates, the Biden camp recorded a big zero in the victory column.
On the other hand, Senator Bernie Sanders, who is considered Biden's biggest rival in the primary, marked "V" on 3 out of 3 states, giving the impression that the Jewish legislature is on its way to sailing for the Democratic presidential nomination.
The former vice president's headquarters have already begun exchanging accusations, and the meager budget is running out anyway.
The big advantage in the polls he had in South Carolina, the next state in the polls, has almost disappeared.
The campaign of the one who was considered from the first moment the clear favorite was on the sure path to a colossal end.
But then a miracle happened, which even Biden himself no longer seemed to dream of.
A few days before the polls opened in South Carolina, the first major state to enter the primaries, Jim Claiborne, a longtime congressman and one of the heads of the local African-American community, publicly announced his support for the former vice president.
In one, it seemed, the creators were overturned.
The black residents of South Carolina went out en masse to the polls, and most of them all stood behind Biden.
The gap, which was almost erased in the polls, reopened in reality, and the former vice president ended the evening of February 29 with an achievement no one expected.
Biden won 49 percent of the vote, leaving a dustbin on rival Sanders who had to settle for just 20 percent support.
If there were any others who thought Biden's victory in South Carolina was coincidental, "Super Tuesday" - the biggest voting day in the Democratic primaries - came 4 days later, proving to everyone that the wheel was back in the hands of the former vice president.
Biden recorded one of the greatest political comebacks in American history, winning in 9 of the 14 states that went to the polls, including the wealthy Texas.
Even in California - where Sanders led the polls by 20 to 30 percent - the vice president managed to rake in quite a few electorates, finishing in a respectable second place, just 8 percent away from his big rival.
"For those who fell, for those who were dropped and forgotten behind - this is your campaign!", Biden boasted in the victory speech on "Big Tuesday."
"Just a few days ago the media and commentators announced that our campaign was dead. Well, we are very much alive. And make no mistake, this campaign will send Donald Trump packing!"
From there, opponents in the Democratic primary retired one by one, and Biden's path to the candidacy was paved.
But as the wind in the sails of the emerging Democratic candidate grew, stability in the U.S. only faltered, with crisis after crisis. It began with the first reports of the Corona virus. Biden, who will celebrate the 78th month and is deep in the risk group, has increasingly underestimated his public appearances and largely moved to conducting a virtual campaign. "Trump goes on to say he's a president in time of war - so let's start behaving like that," Biden declared as the virus spread at a dizzying pace across the United States.
"I, along with every American, hope he surpasses himself."
The former vice president has come under heavy criticism from his camp for claiming he is too soft and conciliatory, and while Trump has received endless media coverage daily, Democrats have struggled to gain public attention.
But Biden's strategy - whether accidental or deliberate - began to make its mark on the polls, and the gap in favor of the vice president began to widen.
While Trump was seen as struggling to control the crisis and confronting the medical system and local authorities, Biden was consolidating his status as a "responsible adult," as someone who could restore order and calm to the system in a spin.
The need for that responsible adult only increased at the end of May, when the United States plunged into another known crisis: George Floyd, a black man, was murdered by police in Minneapolis. The police tied him to the floor with a knee to his neck, while he shouted "I can not breathe The shocking incident, which was documented on the cameras of passers-by, rekindled interracial tensions, and a flood of demonstrations flooded the streets of the United States, a protest that sometimes even escalated into violence.
While Trump attacked the protesters, and sometimes even inflamed the fire, Biden, as usual, tried to demonstrate stateliness.
"To demonstrate against such cruelty is right and necessary," the Democratic candidate declared on the day a night curfew was declared in 25 cities across the United States. "But burning communities, wreaking havoc - is neither right nor necessary.
We are a painful nation, but this pain must not be allowed to destroy us. "
Amid the growing rift in the American public, Biden had to make perhaps one of the most important decisions of the campaign: who will sit next to him as a candidate for vice president?
The former vice president had already "sandaled" himself a few months earlier when he promised to elect a woman, and now, as millions of citizens flood the streets, pressure has increased on Biden to choose someone from the African-American community.
The decision on the deputy took time, and highlighted the Democratic candidate’s decision-making process.
Biden interviewed the main candidates, consulted with his associates and family members, and finally made the decision himself, with the main thing motivating him being the personal connection with the designated deputy.
Senator Kamla Harris, who was a colleague and friend of Bo Biden, the late Vice President's late son, was notified of her choice in a zoom call.
"Are you ready to work?" Biden asked her.
"The answer is definitely yes, I'm so ready," Harris replied excitedly.
The California senator accepted the candidacy for vice president at a time when the role is perhaps more important than ever given Biden's extreme age, but what grabbed the headlines was the importance of actually being the first candidate in the history of a woman of African American and Asian descent to be vice president.
"This morning, all over the country, little girls woke up, mostly black and brown girls who feel so many times not being seen and not appreciated, and today maybe, just maybe, they see themselves for the first time in a new way," Biden proudly declared, the day after the election In Harris.
Trump's entourage tried to portray Harris as "extreme liberal," a label they failed to stick to Biden himself, but even that effort did not really bear fruit.
With Harris by his side, the former vice president continued to run a balanced campaign, some would even say boring, and tried to position himself as the opposite of the current president, who created public outcry and drew fire almost daily.
Step by step, without big rallies and with very few public appearances, the former vice president - who has previously run in two primaries and lost - has reached the moment he has been waiting for perhaps his entire political career: the official announcement of him as the Democratic presidential candidate.
The Democratic convention, which was supposed to be one of the highlights of the campaign, was finally held in the spirit of the times - without an audience and in remote broadcasts.
Biden made his big speech on the last day of the conference as someone who positioned himself as the clear favorite on the one hand, but on the other hand as someone who barely spoke, and earned Trump the derogatory nickname "Sleepy Joe."
But while the entire U.S. seemed to be waiting for the mouthpieces typical of a former vice president, Biden delivered a stately, coherent and unifying speech. "The president has been enveloping America in the dark for too long," Biden said, staring at the camera. "But we can find The light again.
There's only one way forward - to march together as a united America. "The former vice president made a big" V "sign of his speech at the conference, which many commentators hailed as the best speech of his career. Biden's polls only went up, and Democrats' fundraising also broke record after record, while the president and Republicans, who held a large financial advantage at the start of the campaign, found themselves in surprising economic disadvantage.
With these advantages, and when he seems to have only something to lose, Biden arrived in late September for his first televised confrontation with Trump.
Almost from the first moment, what was supposed to be a civilized debate slipped into conflict, with President Trump interrupting Biden over and over again.
The former vice president did not remain obligated, calling Trump "the worst president America has ever had."
It seems that no one will remember from the meeting promises or plans, but mainly insults that the candidates hurled at each other, among other things when Biden shouted at the president "Maybe you will shut up, man?".
Photo: Reuters
To the delight of the Democratic nominee, he may not have won the confrontation, but Trump seems to have lost more, with the U.S. reaffirming how far its current president is from being state-owned. A few days after the first confrontation, Trump fell in Corona, and Biden's poll numbers went even further. The second and final confrontation, which took place about two weeks later, was a little more civilized, but did not fundamentally change the picture of support for the candidates.
Biden, one of the longtime U.S. politicians, will enter the last line of the campaign as a clear favorite, with a small advantage even in some polls in traditional Republican states like Georgia and Texas. Democrats, who were badly burned in 2016, insisted this time not to fall complacent Vigorous until the last minute, without acknowledging for a second that victory might be in their pocket.Symbolically, most models predicted that the state that would decide the election would be Pennsylvania - the state in which Biden was born.