From Pennsylvania to New York, two different origins.
The November 3 election will be a choice between two models: Scranton, middle class, and the opulence of the Big Apple.
Paula lugones
10/03/2020 - 13:51
Clarín.com
World
The November 3 elections were raised as a choice between two very different worlds: “
Scranton vs.
New York
”, the places where the two candidates were born.
The middle class of a small town in the interior of Pennsylvania, where Joe Biden grew up, against the opulence of the metropolis where Donald Trump lived all his life.
Little Joe's dad was long unemployed, while Trump grew up in the Big Apple with a millionaire dad who
sent him to school in a limousine
.
A month after the crucial elections,
Clarín
dived into the childhood of both applicants to the White House, visited the houses where they grew up with his family, spoke with his peers at school and with neighbors about the
personality and origin
of these two men: one of them will rule the future of the United States.
Scranton, the birthplace of Joe Biden's middle class.
It is built of wood, has two floors and a loft, a gable roof so that the snow can slide in winter.
Painted a somewhat rickety gray, an awning unfolds over the porch to cover the now autumn sun.
On the way to the door, which passes through a well-kept garden, a small sign wrapped in nylon warns and predicts: "
Yes, this is the house where the next president, Joe Biden, grew up
."
How it got here
Party:
Democratic Party
Age:
77 years
Date of birth:
20.11.1942
Place of birth:
Scranton, Pennsylvania
Profession:
Lawyer
First Election Office:
New Castle County Council (1970)
Positions held:
Councilor (1970-72), Senator (1972-2009), Vice President (2009-2017)
Political longevity
Joe Biden has had a 50-year political career.
This is the third time he has sought to be president of the United States: he tried his luck in 1987 and 2007, but failed to overcome the Democratic primary.
He was 29 when in 1972 he was first elected to the Senate, becoming the sixth youngest person to reach the Upper House.
If he wins the election, Biden, who is currently 77, will become the oldest person to ever reach the presidency.
Yes to war
Biden was one of the Democratic senators who voted for the United States to invade Iraq in 2002. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he was a visible figure who argued strongly in favor of the war.
In fact, he was present in the White House when George Bush signed the resolution that allowed the use of military force in that country.
In subsequent years, he has acknowledged that the Iraq war was a "mistake."
Heavy handed with crime
In 1994, Biden co-authored the Violent Crime Control Act, the largest crime legislation in US history. He imposed harsher sentences for certain crimes and provided funds to states to build more prisons.
The law, however, has been criticized for the impact it allegedly had on rising incarceration rates for racial minorities.
As Biden seeks to win the support of progressive sectors, this antecedent generates resistance.
Controversy in the Supreme Court
Biden chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee that in 1991 conducted hearings to confirm Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas.
The highlight of this process was the presence of a woman named Anita Hill, who testified that Thomas had sexually harassed her.
Biden's performance was controversial and is criticized to this day, as he did not allow several women who could corroborate that what Hill was saying were summoned to testify.
Enemy of Arms
Following the 2012 school shooting at Sandy Hook College in Newton, Connecticut, Barack Obama created a committee to offer recommendations to reduce gun violence.
Biden, at that time vice president, was appointed to lead this task force.
This committee recommended a series of measures that were carried out, among them a more exhaustive screening of potential buyers, and a ban on certain types of automatic weapons.
Inside, a friendly white-haired woman in her late 90s, today the owner of the place, apologizes for not being able to receive visitors due to the pandemic.
But a series of friends and neighbors in this city told
Clarín
what little Joe, today 77 years old, was like, whom they describe as "noble and decent", a student who was not very bright, who liked to play baseball and who
charged for being a stutterer
.
Simple, typical of the suburban middle class, the residence where the candidate
lived his first 10 years
is in Scranton, a city of 77,000 inhabitants in the heart of Pennsylvania, just two hours from New York, where President Donald Trump was born.
But the cradles of both candidates to the White House are very different places.
Joe Biden lived here until he was 10 years old.
The first impression upon arriving in Scranton is the
contrast between its past and its present
.
Founded in 1856, it quickly became a major mining and railway center, a pole that attracted Irish and Italian immigrants, which is why the dominant religion in this area is the Catholic, the one professed by Biden.
The candidate's mother and grandparents arrived from Ireland.
It was a heyday, when America's first electric streetcar was seen there, and Scranton is known as "the electric city."
That past of bonanza is observed in the imposing buildings of the center.
But after World War II and decreased demand for minerals, the city's industries ran into trouble.
Joe Robinette Biden Sr, the candidate's father, had already married, had four children, and worked in a company linked to the shipping industry.
But the company fell apart and he
was fired
.
He spent several months without work, with enormous difficulties in supporting his family.
Like thousands of locals, the dad
decided to move with his family
to the neighboring state of Delaware where he finally got a job as a car salesman and had a good time.
"
Dad always told me that the measure of a man is not how many times they hit him but how fast he gets up,
" Biden often recalls in his actions.
On the doorstep of the University of Scranton, Professor Mike Allison recounts that “in WWII 200,000 people lived in the city, but then an exodus began and now there are only 77,000 left.
It has a much larger infrastructure given the number of people that inhabit it ”.
Now, this enclave surrounded by gentle mountains has been converted into an educational and medical center, with three universities and three hospitals.
From left to right: Joe Biden, Charlie Roth (childhood friend), Senator Edward Kennedy and Tom Bell, Biden's schoolmate
Although the downtown buildings speak of past splendor, Scranton looks empty, much more in the suburbs, where little Joe lived for 10 years until they moved to Delaware, where he studied law (
if he wins, he will be the president who did not go to a elite university
) and made his 47-year political career as a national senator and vice president of Barack Obama.
In the surrounding houses you can see posters in support of the Democrat and many of them with their own stamp: "
Scranton Loves Joe
."
Nearby is StPaul Elementary School, Catholic, where Biden was studying with Tom Bell.
“
We grew up together in the same neighborhood, we went to the same school, I was his partner at the bank.
Our mothers also studied together and were great friends
”, she tells
Clarín
and highlights that she lived for many years in front of Biden's gray house.
"
A small house, very nice, middle class
."
“He was quiet, he wasn't a great student and neither was I. Sister Eunice, who died at 100, had nicknames for us because we were great friends and we always sat together. He would say 'Bye Bye Blackbird' to Joe, because he stuttered and when asked his name he would say 'Bi, Bi, Biden
'.
This difficulty sometimes appears even today in his speeches and he is seen
struggling with words
, something that Trump often mocks by pointing out incoherence or lack of capacity.
At the August Democratic Convention, a stuttering 12-year-old delivered a message saying that Biden had given him advice to overcome the problem.
Two blocks from his childhood home, there is still an 80-year-old run-down business where Biden used to shop for baseball figurines, his favorite sport, and eat sandwiches.
Even today, when he visits Scranton, he returns to that place, with sideboards from another time, decorated with dolls and old postcards of athletes covered in dust.
Tom Owens, the owner of "Hank's Hoagies", says that Biden "
came when he was a senator, also vice president.
He would arrive with the secret service and everything was suddenly full of people,
"he recalls, and shows a photo of the candidate in that place.
A few weeks ago he was also there.
The Democrat likes the Italian Sandwich, but the last time he had a tuna fish “
because his wife told him to order something healthier,
” Tom laughs.
“
He's a very good man, he always makes everyone here comfortable.
We love him very much
”.
You can tell: inside there is a life-size cardboard Biden (they hung a chinstrap on it) with which visitors usually take photos.
"Here Joe used to buy the baseball figurines when he was a kid," says Tom Owens, and says the candidate still visits the place: "He's a good man."
“He is a normal man. He's good to everyone and great to kids. He's joking, he's a normal person,
"adds Tom, and that's exactly what Biden is looking for in this campaign.
Faced with an eccentric, millionaire and unpredictable man like Trump, he
wants to show himself as a common, middle-class guy
who, like many Americans, has fought economic and personal blows, since his wife and a daughter of just one year have died year in an accident in 1972 and another son of brain cancer in 2015.
Democrats tend to sweep the big cities, more diverse, liberal and cosmopolitan.
That is why Biden now seeks to capture that majority white electorate from small places in the interior of the country, of people who do not have a university degree, who were the voters who favored Trump in 2016. That is why he has raised this election as a fight between “Scranton vs Park Avenue ”, the luxurious New York avenue where millionaires live and several bank branches are located.
Trump's city.
Professor Mike Allison, at the door of the University of Scranton: "Biden wants to show that he is from here and that the elite is Trump."
As Professor Allison puts it, “
The president always points out that elites and cities don't understand people who live in small inland communities.
Biden try to reverse that message: He wants to show that he is from Scranton and that the elite is Trump, not him.
That Biden has his roots in a working-class city and that is why he understands what happens in America.
It differs from Trump, who received millions of dollars from his dad, whereas he started with nothing
. "
Tom, his childhood friend, makes a less political and more personal analysis: “
Joe will be a very good president.
He is a very fair person, someone who truly believes that everyone deserves to have a chance.
He represents me, the people of Scranton and I think the entire United States
. "
How it got here
Party:
Republican Party
Age:
74 years
Date of birth:
06.14.1946
Place of birth:
Queens, New York
Profession:
Entrepreneur
First electoral office:
President (2017)
Positions held:
President
Elusive deals
In 2019, Donald Trump became the first American president to cross the line of war between South and North Korea.
In the demilitarized zone between the two countries, he met for the third time with the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un, in an attempt to reach a nuclear agreement, which has not yet been finalized.
Both had already met in Singapore, and in Vietnam, also in 2019.
Owner of the evangelical vote
In January 2016, Trump gave a campaign speech at a small Christian college called DordtUniversity in Iowa. It was there that he claimed that he “could murder someone on Fifth Avenue and no one would do anything to me,” a statement that was reproduced throughout. the media.
But that day he also assured the audience that, with him, “Christianity would once again have power,” thus sealing an alliance with the evangelical Christian movement, a segment that was crucial to his arrival at the presidency.
Unfortunate phrases
Throughout his presidential campaign in 2016, Trump expressed his devotion to the Army.
Some media claimed that he even requested a military parade for his inauguration ceremony in Washington DC.
Despite this, they have criticized and mocked soldiers who are captured or killed in combat.
In 2015, he claimed that he preferred soldiers "who are not captured," an allusion to criticism he received from former Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
Changing positions
From an economic point of view, Trump was an unusual candidate.
While he ran as a Republican, he offered proposals that appealed to a working class that in recent decades was more akin to the Democrats.
However, once elected, his policies were characterized by reverting to the orthodoxy of the Republican Party: his proposal to launch a large infrastructure-building program and increase taxes on the wealthiest was replaced by greater deregulation and tax cuts.
America first
Moving away from a global governance scheme and favoring national sovereignty has been a goal of Trump since he came to power.
Thus it was that in his first months of government he withdrew from the Paris Agreement, referring to climate issues, and from the Trans-Pacific Agreement for Economic Cooperation, a free trade agreement in the Pacific region.
In the same way, he has ordered the United States to withdraw from the World Health Organization, and has strongly criticized the role of NATO.
Trump's origins
The house where Trump grew up draws attention.
Clad in exposed brick, in a Georgian style, it has six white Roman columns that frame a magnificent portico.
Two floors, 20 meters wide,
23 rooms, 9 bathrooms
, it is on an avenue, at the top of a small hill in a well-kept garden with a 17-step staircase and
a flagpole on which the American flag flies
.
There are no posters, signs, nothing to indicate that the current president of the United States, Donald Trump, grew up in that place.
The surrounding mansions are somewhat smaller, but the owners are clearly having a good time too.
The charming neighborhood is Jamaica Estates, in Queens, one of the counties of New York, where Fred Trump, real estate entrepreneur and Donald's father, decided to settle with his family more than 70 years ago and where the future president
played soccer, walked in bike and misbehaved
.
According to
one of his old schoolmates
told
Clarín
, little "Donny" already showed at age 10 some traits that seem to have settled in time: he
was boastful, he liked to pull girls' hair, throw little papers and almost every day he was put on penance for disturbing in class
.
He was "King Donald" even then, laughs his friend, a "Cassius Clay, but white" bully.
The campaign for the presidential elections has been raised as a symbolic election between "Scranton vs New York", the places where the two candidates competing for the White House were born.
Faced with Joe Biden's middle-class origins, Trump grew up in the Big Apple with a
millionaire father who sent him to school in a limousine
.
Paul Onish is 74 years old, as the president, and he retired as a computer engineer.
He now lives in New Jersey, but as a boy he lived near Trump's house and they were good friends.
He says he met "Donny" in 1956 at Kew Forrest School, a "very expensive" private school.
"I was walking to class because I lived 7 blocks away, but Donald and his brothers were in one of their father's limousines, a driver brought them," he says.
Tump's birth house.
At that time, Trump's father was already a strong real estate entrepreneur who had managed to establish himself in New York.
Married to Mary, they had first settled in the same neighborhood in a much smaller Tudor-style house that was once rented by Airbnb.
But as his business progressed, he moved around and built on an avenue with a tree-lined boulevard the great house he dreamed of for his family with four children.
Onish and Trump shared classes and afternoon sports activities.
They played soccer in the back of the school.
“Both he and I were very good, we were defenders.
We didn't really let anyone pass us and we were very fast, ”he says.
The president's youngest son, Barron, 15, is also a soccer fan.
In his biography,
The Art of the Deal
, Trump notes: "
When I look at myself in the first grade and I see myself now, I am basically the same person
."
His partner remembers him as a tall, corpulent boy who stood out among the rest not only because of his physique but also because of his behavior: “He
was someone who could be defined as a bully because he was bothering him all the time, he wanted to do things to his way and both he and I always had to stay in penance after class because we behaved badly.
It was because we did mischief like throwing paper balls in class, moving desks, and bumping them.
He liked to pull girls' hair from behind and it really made them really mad.
He was more annoying than me
. "
The elementary school remains one of the most prestigious in the neighborhood.
Founded in 1918, it is also made of exposed brick and a more modern one was added to the old building that Trump was going to.
Today there are classes, despite the coronavirus and at the exit you see a swarm of luxurious cars that stop at the door to pick up their children.
But little "Donny" did not last long in that place because, according to his friend, the authorities kindly asked the parents to
change him schools because of his behavior
.
Trump himself said that he once
hit the music teacher and left her with a
black
eye
, although no one could ever prove it.
Maybe he was bragging.
The truth is that his parents took him out of school at age 13 and, in search of discipline, sent him as a
boarding school to a military academy
, where he had to leave the comforts of a rich kid and learn to dress up his uniform and polish his clothes. shoes on their own.
Gone is his house with a cook and state-of-the-art toys and the intercom between rooms that his friends admired.
After his time in academia, Trump entered New York's Fordham University and then Wharton School of Business, at an elite Pennsylvania university.
His niece recounted in a recent book that she
had cheated on the entrance exam
.
12-year-old Donald Trump (second from left) attends Paul Onish's bar mitzvah party, second from right.
After receiving a
million dollars
from his father
so that he could develop his own projects
, Trump joined the family business and expanded it until he managed to build the dream of his own golden tower on the luxurious 5th Avenue of Mahnattan, where he expanded his real estate empire.
In the meantime, he used to frequent trendy nightclubs and in the 70s he was a regular at the famous Studio 54, where he surrounded himself with pretty models.
He was married three times, (to Ivanna Trump, Marla Maples and Melania) and had 5 children.
Despite being a beloved son of New York,
the city does not like him very much
.
It is a cosmopolitan, liberal and diverse megalopolis, far removed from the president's conservative message, which
aims against immigrants, gays, abortion and climate change
.
In 2016, for example, he was defeated by Hillary Clinton by almost 60% of the vote.
The polls are now also unfavorable for him.
Trump with his seventh grade class at Kew-Forest School.
He's standing in the last row, on the far right.
Instead, Trump's message finds an echo in Deep America, in small, mostly white, conservative middle-class urban centers.
That's why Biden seeks to highlight his struggling family origins in Scranton.
And he paints Trump as a
son of New York opulence
, as a wealthy elitist who lives outside the reality of the common citizen.
Near the house where the president grew up, Tirsa Scarlon watches over her children while they play in a park.
Masseur, had had trouble paying rent in times of coronavirus.
“I
vote for Biden, because he is for the people and Trump is for the rich.
During his presidency he has changed taxes so that the rich do not pay
”, he points out.
When asked how he thinks people in his neighborhood will vote in November, he says: "
Those who own their homes and have businesses vote Republicans, those who rent vote for Biden
."
Young Donald plays a sailor in the musical "HMS Pinafore" at his high school.
He appears with a whistle around his neck.
The childhood friend lost track of Trump when he went to the academy, but then saw him a few times for work reasons.
He even brought her a photo of their Bar Mitzvah once, where they are seen together.
The tycoon always treated him very well.
"
Donny was born between money and his position allowed him a great lifestyle and then go on to manage property, build and become rich and famous,
" said his friend Onish.
“
But I think he doesn't know the reality of the middle class in the United States.
He doesn't know what it's like to grow up without having everything that a person needs.
You don't know about the Scranton workers, you don't know what it's like to work long two jobs.
You don't know what it's like to have no health insurance.
Trump only wants to rule for himself and only in his own way.
He thinks he knows more than the others.
He is the 'King Donald'
".
The president's childhood friend is voting for Biden.
DB