WASHINGTON: Democrat Joe Biden, the projected winner of the US presidential election, calls for unity and promises to be a president” for all Americans.” “America, I’m honoured that you have chosen me to lead our great country. The work ahead of us will be hard, but I promise you this: I will be a President for all Americans — whether you voted for me or not,” he tweeted. In a separate statement, Biden says: “It’s time to put the anger and the harsh rhetoric behind us and come together as a nation.” CNN, NBC News and CBS News called the race in Biden’s favor just before 11:30 am (1630 GMT) as an insurmountable lead in Pennsylvania took the 77-year-old over the top in the state-by-state count that decides the presidency.
Trump had no immediate reaction to the announcement, but as Biden’s lead grew during vote counts since Tuesday’s election, the Republican president lashed out with unsubstantiated claims of fraud and claimed, falsely, that he had won.
Earlier Saturday, as he headed to his golf course in Virginia, he repeated this, tweeting: “I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!”
However, the result now condemns 74-year-old Trump to becoming the first one-term president since George H W Bush at the start of the 1990s.
Biden, who got the votes of a record more than 74 million people, was hunkered down with his running mate Kamala Harris, in his home town of Wilmington, Delaware. Late Friday he delivered an address urging Americans to “come together as a nation and heal.”
The Secret Service has already begun intensifying its protective bubble around the president-elect, who will be inaugurated on January 20.
A centrist who promises to bring calm to Washington after four turbulent years under Trump, Biden is the oldest man to win the presidency — a position he twice sought unsuccessfully during his long political career, before being elected vice president to Barack Obama in 2008.
Harris, a senator and former California attorney general, will make history as the first Black woman to enter the White House in either of the two top jobs. At 56, she is seen as a leading contender to succeed Biden and try to become the first female US president.
Overall turnout on Tuesday broke records with some 160 million people pouring out across the United States after a deeply polarizing campaign complicated by the resurgent COVID-19 pandemic.
Biden secured his win by recapturing the Midwestern states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — traditional Democratic territory that Trump had flipped in 2016 with his powerful appeal to white, working class voters.
The division in Washington will likely complicate immediately Biden’s ability to govern, starting with disputes in Congress over a delayed economic stimulus package for Americans hammered by the fallout from the coronavirus crisis.
Joe Biden, who spent most of his life serving in Washington as a Democratic senator and then vice president under Barack Obama, will finally find himself atop the highest point in the capital city as president.
At the age of 77, Biden, a one-time lawyer, pitched himself during the campaign as a moderate “every man” who can relate to the problems working people are facing, while embracing some progressive ideas, like tackling climate change and improving health care.
He took a relatively low-key approach to campaigning, in part due to the pandemic, but often, it seemed, he was letting President Donald Trump seize the spotlight, making the election a referendum on an incumbent who often talked himself into trouble.
Biden, who studiously avoided radical politics during the months of campaigning, has denounced Trump as a chaos agent and much of his outreach to voters has been centred on a pledge to return to a better and calmer version of life pre-Trump.
His election victory, narrowly eked out through wins in key swing states, comes after two failed presidential campaigns in 1988 and 2008, with multiple family tragedies at times upending Biden’s life and political plans.
The septuagenarian is ever more grey and his speech is showing some signs of slowing, but he will soon be in the driving seat of the US,with decades of experience behind him. Biden was the long-serving senator from Delaware — having first won the seat at the age of 29 — before being tapped as vice president to provide a seasoned Washington perspective to Barack Obama who won the White House in 2008 as a relative newcomer to national politics.
Biden was then viewed as someone pragmatic who would bring on board white working-class voters, and was sought after for his foreign policy bona fides. His time on Capitol Hill was also valued by the Obama team, as legislative deal-making is a delicate dance that trips up novices and can rattle presidencies. He is religious, but moderate; liberal, but not overly so.
Biden capitalised on this in the election as he played for the centre ground, while holding his left-flank and even bringing on board disenfranchised Republicans.
In 1987, Biden’s hope to become president ended swiftly, when he was rather credibly accused of plagiarizing a speech during a primary campaign.
In 2008, his remark that Obama was not yet ready to be president came back to haunt him during the election. In 2016, though, he chose not to run after eight years as vice president, after his son died of cancer and he decided to spend time with his grandchildren. It was the latest personal setback for Biden. His first wife and a daughter died in a car accident in 1972.
His sons were badly injured. He nevertheless took his Senate seat but travelled back and forth each day from his home in Delaware to Washington, so he could see his two boys each night.
His use of the train became something of a legend and added to Biden’s popularity. It was still employed by his 2020 campaign -along with his famous love of ice cream — to market Biden as relatable and understanding of blue-collar workers. — AFP/dpa
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