Obama warns against complacency over Biden poll lead
Former US President Barack Obama excoriated Donald Trump and warned on Wednesday against complacency despite favorable view polls during his first public rally in support of Democratic challenger Joe Biden ahead of the November 3 election.
At the drive-in rally in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, one of a small number of battleground states expected to decide the election, Obama lashed out at Trump’s behavior and declared him “not capable of taking the work seriously.”
But he also issued a stark reminder of 2016, when thoughts and opinions polls showed Hillary Clinton as the clear favorite - limited to her and her supporters to be shocked by a Trump victory on election day.
“We can’t be complacent. I don’t value the polls,” the former two-term president told the rally outside a baseball stadium.
“There were a lot of polls last time. Didn’t workout. Because a whole couple of folks stayed in the home. And got lazy and complacent. Not this time around. Not in this election.”
He told supporters that an excessive amount of was on the line to have four more years of Trump leading the country, wanting to contrast his successor - a Republican property mogul and ex-reality TV star - with his former vice president.
“This is not possible show. That is reality,” Obama said.
“And ordinary people experienced to live with the consequences of him proving himself not capable of taking the work seriously.”
He pointed to Trump’s running roughshod over previous norms, including his retweets of conspiracy theories, and accused him of mishandling the US response to the coronavirus pandemic.
“Our democracy’s not likely to work if the persons who are said to be our leaders lie each day and just make things up,” he said.
“And we just become numb to it.”
Earlier, at a roundtable with Black community organizers in Philadelphia, he said “the pandemic could have been tough for any president, we haven’t seen something similar to this for a century.”
The coronavirus has killed over 220,000 persons in america and seriously wounded the world’s major economy, prompting fierce criticism of the president’s handling of the crisis.
“We can’t afford another four years of the,” Obama said.
- Final debate ahead -
While Obama was in Pennsylvania, Trump visited North Carolina, another of the battleground states, where he riled up the crowd with popular campaign themes, such as his law-and-order platform.
“If Biden wins, the flag-burning demonstrators in the pub will be running your authorities,” Trump told spectators gathered at a municipal airport in metropolis of Gastonia.
Biden is before Trump by 2.3 percentage points in the state, according to a polling average by RealClearPolitics.
A Quinnipiac University poll of likely voters released on Wednesday meanwhile gave Biden a 51-43 lead in Pennsylvania, which Trump won by a narrow margin in 2016.
Trump is trailing Biden in the national polls, and another Quinnipiac poll spelled potential trouble for his reelection hopes.
The poll had the Democratic and Republican presidential individuals in a 47-47 dead heat in Texas, circumstances which Trump won by nine points four years back and which hasn’t voted for a Democrat since Jimmy Carter in 1976.
Biden, 77, had no public events on his schedule on Wednesday for the 3rd day in a row, leading the 74-year-old Trump to accuse his Democratic opponent of going “into hiding.”
The Biden campaign said he was finding your way through the second and final debate against Trump in Nashville, Tennessee, on Thursday.
Obama remained on the sidelines through the Democratic presidential primaries, but he threw his support behind Biden after his former vice president won the party nomination.
The Biden campaign is hoping the star power of America’s first Black president can help boost turnout among young voters and African Americans, who are fundamental to Democratic hopes of recapturing the White House.
African Americans voted in record numbers for Obama in 2008 and 2012 but their participation dropped off in 2016, a contributing factor to Trump’s victory over Clinton.
- ‘Existential matter’ -
Trump has spent a lot of his first term in office seeking to erase the legacy of his predecessor but Obama doesn’t view the election as a “personal grudge match with Trump,” Obama’s former chief strategist David Axelrod said.
“He views it as an existential matter for the country and for democracy,” Axelrod told CNN.
While Biden has been keeping a minimal profile in the last couple of days, Trump is wanting to recapture the enthusiasm of four years ago with daily rallies in battleground states.
Trump’s message has included telling Americans that the coronavirus outbreak is practically over, together with attacks on the business enterprise dealings of Biden’s son, Hunter, while his father was vice president.
Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris taken care of immediately the attacks on Hunter Biden on Wednesday at an early vote mobilization event in North Carolina.
“Among the things I love about Joe Biden - he doesn’t take on or speak about other people’s kids,” Harris said.
More than 40 million Americans have previously voted, based on the US Elections Project of the University of Florida, practically thirty percent of the total turnout in 2016.
