WILMINGTON, Delaware. – Joe Biden’s chartered planes and vans are meticulously sprayed with disinfectant and cleaned. The microphones, lecterns and shirts you wear are cleaned in the moments before your arrival. The hounds watching the crusade are taking their temperature. The other people you know are scanned in advance with thermometer chopsticks and visitors are sometimes cordoned off in express locations mapped with a tape measure.
The former vice president is rarely unmasked when in public or around someone other than his wife, Jill Biden. Access to their homes is limited to just a few staff members, and when inside, they all wear a mask, Biden added. The field point is such that sometimes, when stopping to drink water, that user turns the heads of others to lessen the threat of the drops dispersing, according to those attending the crusade.
With more than 6 million people inflamed and just about 200,000 coronavirus deaths, the former vice president does not take any chances with his safety, which evolves into a bubble saturated with disinfectant within the classic presidential campaign bubble, a designed and cultivated environment. obsessively through staff to check it out to protect it from a imaginable encounter with the virus.
The justification for paying careful attention to protection is non-public and political. For months, attendees have admitted privately to be involved in their health. At age 77, Biden is more vulnerable to the Covid-19 virus and his age places him in a higher threat of severe headaches of the disease.
However, the crusade has also pledged to characterize the guilty habit, to undermine his brutal message about Covid-19, and to accentuate the contrast with Donald Trump, who, on the main non-socially remote occasions the president has collected in the country, is satisfied. make fun Biden. de to wear a mask frequently.
Biden’s deputy crusader Kate Bedingfield said the crusader’s reasoning for being so careful is simple: “We no longer need Americans to get the virus. “
“What we constantly hear from other people is that they are frustrated with the way Trump has engaged over the summer, that he is not following public fitness rules while not going to the funeral and sharing the percentage of the sacrifice for six, seven months. now, ” said Bedingfield. ” They are frustrated when they see Donald Trump behaving irresponsably at a political event. “
As its public program intensified late last month, the crusade announced that Biden and vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris would be screened for coronavirus, and that any positive review of the virus would be made public. and security that remain close to them. Trump said in July he would take a check every two to three days on average.
Biden’s crusade also largely adheres to the rules of occupation in the state. To get a concept of his efforts, in addition to relying on first-hand observations on the road, POLITICO interviewed about 20 crusaders and advisers, Democratic officials and event participants. .
Biden’s crowds are sometimes kept in small dozens. Media members are separated into individual white circles drawn on the floor. Staff arrive early at sites to measure distances and place sticky notes indicating where masked visitors will need to maintain their position to make at least 6 feet of separation true.
An occasion with unionized car personnel last week in Warren, Michigan, where meetings are limited to a hundred others, revealed the full scope of the effort. Participants were asked to stay home if they experienced covid-19 symptoms. President Rory Gamble planned to greet Biden, but went into pre-trial quarantine Tuesday night after a member of the family circle showed symptoms and underwent tests.
Before the occasion began, Biden’s director asked the public to stand still so they could perform a precise recount, a recount that included the Secret Service, staff, media and a production team. An ad implored the crowd to “stay in their circles and keep your mask on for the duration of the occasion. “
The eyes of the field form in the bubble. When Biden inadvertently gets too close to others, the staff jumps with warnings: “Six feet!Six feet!” they shouted aides in uniesonuming at a recent press convention in Wilmington.
“Hold on!” Biden charged through staff while in the middle of his sentence at an assembly in Wisconsin.
At the AFL-CIO headquarters in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, an assembly in which visitors wearing a black mask with the slogan “Union Yes,” the blows replaced the classic handshakes. On Friday, at the September 11 memorial in Manhattan, Biden approached and elbowed the vice president. Mike Pence, and photographs of his “elbows” appeared in the headlines the next day.
“There has been a lot of effort to do this in a Covid safe manner,” said the Rev. Jonathan Barker, pastor of Grace Lutheran Church in Kenosha, Wisconsin, referring to the wave of exchanges between Biden’s crusade and participants. recent meeting. “They had a tape measure and they measured where other people might be and they used numbers to mark places. “
The legal Grace Lutherans were asked to remove the mask they were dressed in and to hand over more N-95 protective masks. They were escorted, one by one, to the assigned seats, separated by at least 6 feet.
“It’s very deliberate and prudent,” said Lori Hawkins, Kenosha’s Democratic president.
Barker said the church site may have easily accommodated 75 other people, but may have created an optician. “They wanted to keep other people 6 feet away, but they also wanted to have other people relatively ahead,” he said. Said.
The president, who has resisted dressing up in public and played a prominent role in politicizing the debate around mask wearing, has begun to mock the rigour of his challenger’s approach and mocked the mandates of outdoor states on attendance limits in many states in recent weeks, adding Michigan and North Carolina.
“Have you ever noticed the gyms with the circles?It’s his crowd,” Trump said cheerfully in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, comparing Biden’s understated events to his own high-energy jamborees. In Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Trump asked his crowd, “Have you ever noticed a guy he likes as much as he does?”
“It gives you a sense of security,” Trump said of Biden. “If I were a psychiatrist, I? I’d say this guy’s in big trouble. “Attendees joined Biden’s taunts and taunts for Labor Day photos in which he appeared solemnly masked. with a handful of unionized staff sitting in picnic chairs.
On Sunday night, Trump defied Nevada state regulations, and his own federal fitness rules, on his first occasion to crusade indoors in front of a crowd crowd crowded since June.
In Trump’s recent speeches — his crusade no longer refers to rallies–, many viewers brazenly forget about local regulations through cunning opposites to others without a mask, but Trump believes he has the merit of putting pressure on the electorate who distrusts the government’s excesses and is tired after months of keeping his distance.
Tim Murtaugh, Trump’s communications director, said Biden’s “ground excursions” were evidence that the president had momentum in the race.
“President Trump has had great merit over enthusiasm and attracts large, noisy crowds,” he said, “while Biden can organize a crusade in a broom closet. “
On Thursday, Biden gave the impression of returning to taunts, freeing an Instagram reel from his silent state and sliding a giant black mask over his face.
Trump’s disastrous rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma last June, which had a weaker-than-expected involvement and “probably contributed” to the spread of the virus, helped Biden justify his slow summer increase. reappeared on the electoral roll – 3 out of five days last week and 4 out of five the previous week – the differences are increasingly in sight.
Nowhere is this more evident than at party conventions in August. At the Democratic convention, anyone entering the Wilmington Chase Center at the time Biden spoke had to undergo Covid’s tests and get negative effects for two consecutive days. even others who distribute food and domestic workers.
Journalists covering Biden and Harris also arrived days in advance for consecutive tests and were asked to “isolate” them in their hotel rooms. Their “multitudes” were limited to a few dozen hounds and some secret services, all masked.
Ret. -ret. De Trump delivered in front of a giant crowd, usually unmasked, in the South White House garden.
Polls show that most Americans in all parties say wearing a mask restricts the spread of coronavirus, but those same polls also show a partisan divide on the subject. Republicans (32%) remain much more likely than Democrats (3). %) and the self-employed (17%) to say that masks don’t restrict spread, according to Kaiser Family Foundation Health’s latest follow-up survey on Thursday.
While Biden’s developing public appearances will check the campaign’s ability to keep it at a safe distance, Democrats are eager to see Biden adjust to what they see as their opponent’s recklessness.
“The worst thing that could have happened is to look to do what Trump does, and then an organization of other people gets sick,” said Joel Rutherford, president of the Black Democratic Caucus of Macomb County, Michigan. “Trump is a showman. It’s about the optics of things, not security. He doesn’t care about social estinement; he doesn’t care about masks. You just need to look amazing on TV, and that means focusing on as many other people as you can. [at its events].
However, Biden’s precautions have led to infrequent complaints, and some members of his party have become angry. his message and his candidate in a way that would be more complicated with a giant media organization following him.
Terrance Warthen, former co-chair of Our Wisconsin Revolution, said Biden went too far in raising Covid-19’s considerations by moving his nomination speech to Wilmington, rather than Milwaukee, where the national conference was originally scheduled. They deserve to have given the speech and may even have made a safe bus and greeted the window, at least to pay homage to the city and the state.
“You may have made a very remote journey, ” said Warthen. “This would have been the icing on the cake of a decent distance convention. He’s got the resources to do it, it’s half a presidential race . . . Do you take Wisconsin for granted?”
In Kenosha, there were personal reprimands of participants who said they hoped to pose for individual photos with Biden. And on Labor Day, a Milwaukee television reporter told Harris that citizens were disappointed that Wilmington was invited to a post-convention pyrotechnic show, that his city.
Harris replied that it was a resolution of “no one is excited to take” and noted that their own Labor Day meetings were small and vigilant: “We all wear our mask inside, we are separated by at least 6 feet, we don’t have as big an organization as I would have liked,” he says.
Harris added: “This is what we have to do in a Covid world. “