A group of Joe Biden supporters celebrate the election results this November 6, Washington.MICHAEL REYNOLDS / EFE
As the scrutiny concluded, Joe Biden, the likely winner of the US elections, has been donning an institutional aura that is by no means alien to him, because, unlike Donald Trump, he is a political patrician: eight years as vice president of Barack Obama and 36 years as senator from Delaware endorse him.
Since the election night, when, despite the fact that the count favored Trump in many states, he did not refuse to show himself before his own, he has been seen with a choreography of steps very measured by Wilmington, where he resides, as president
in péctore
, between calls for calm and the legality of the scrutiny process;
cloaked in a reinforced mask - he is about to turn 78 years old - and, finally, after almost 72 hours of waiting, with an institutional message to the nation, in an appearance scheduled for this Friday night, local time.
Wilmington (Delaware), the city that has forged Biden in his image and likeness to the point of patenting what is known as the 'Delaware Way' - a close and pragmatic way of doing politics - began this Friday to sigh in relief, but with the bitter aftertaste of the mud with which Trump's losing evil has tainted the victory.
In front of the podium set up in the convention center from which the democrat addressed his followers after midnight on Wednesday and this Thursday, there were a few dozen faithful, like the believer who waits before an altar, waiting for the official proclamation.
The streets of the city center, where this Thursday he could be seen briefly with his partner Kamala Harris, a possible future vice president, were combed by the secret service, whose presence around Biden's home, on the outskirts of the city, and in the congress center that has made its headquarters, is increasingly evident.
Although Biden had already had an official escort since March, when his nomination as a Democratic candidate was confirmed, the difference between the number of troops that surrounded him in his last public outing - to an African-American youth center, this Tuesday, when they had not yet closed the polls - and the rollout this Thursday was overwhelming.
The count might be dubious, but security wasn't.
The increase in the sound of the sirens in the city center is another sign of the imminence, as well as the reinforcement of the airspace surveillance measures, with at least two helicopters.
Officially the secret service has not ruled on the matter, citing operational security reasons.
In this city of 70,000 inhabitants where several facilities bear his name - the train station;
a swimming pool, perhaps in memory of his early life as a lifeguard, 57% of its inhabitants are African-American, and their differences with the rest of the population, bleeding.
Brand new office buildings hide chasms of poverty around the corner;
the sidewalks of the financial district, as generous as they are absurd because no one travels them, become passageways in black neighborhoods like Kay Smith, an African-American clinic aide and a faithful follower of Biden.
Wilmington, the politician said in July, following the wave of protests that followed the murder of an African American by a police officer in Minneapolis, "is the ideal place to write the fight against racial economic inequality," a purpose that figures in his program of Government.
But Smith hardly notices that plan, an injection of 30,000 million dollars to empower the country's minorities, perhaps because Wilmington is not aware of it, or because of the structural difficulty of the task.
“I don't know if he will be able to carry out that aid program, he will meet a lot of resistance.
But it is also that now the priority is to stop the pandemic, that is the first thing to do.
I see people dying every day and Trump is the one who has allowed all this. "
Biden has the pandemic very much in mind;
So much so that his voters have gone to the polls driven by the coronavirus crisis, while Trump's were pushed by the economy, several US media pointed out on Wednesday.
That is why he began his speech on Thursday with a memory to the victims and a message of condolence to their families.
"I just held a meeting on the situation of the health crisis caused by the coronavirus, that terrible disease that has taken more than 234,000 compatriots from us," he said, another palpable difference from Trump's denial.
The candidate who has promised a single federal command against the pandemic and a national mask, social distance, tests and tracing plan, has again tested negative for the virus, his campaign team reported on Thursday.
With droppers, but with firmness, the probable 46th president of the United States has been reeling in these days other immediate measures of his future mandate, such as the announcement, on Wednesday, that he will reintegrate the United States into the Paris Climate Agreement, just the The same day the Trump Administration officially withdrew from the pact.
Faced with the impulses and improvisation of the Republican, Biden's road map and his public gestures suggest a calm exercise of power.
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