Daily US Times: On his 100th day in Oval Office, Joe Biden spontaneously lowered his face mask, leaned towards the microphone and shouted: “Go Georgia, we need you!”
It was a fitting moment in a state that has more claim than most to be the ground zero of a potentially transformative presidency.
President Joe Biden had just marked the 100-day milestone with a drive-in rally in Duluth, to promote his $4tn investment plans to rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure and vastly expand the government’s social safety net.
Troubled by a cough, and briefly interrupted by protesters demanding an end to private prisons, Mr Biden gave an abridged version of his speech to the joint session of the US Congress the previous evening.
But the president paid particular attention – and gratitude – to an audience that has played an outsized role in the making of his presidency
Towards the end of his campaign, Joe Biden visited Warm Springs, the Georgia town that helped Franklin Roosevelt cope with polio. Joe Biden became, by a narrow margin, the first Democrat to win the state of Georgia since Bill Clinton in 1992.
Then on 5 January, unexpected runoff wins by Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoffs in Georgia gave Democrats the balance of power in the Senate. If Republicans had retained control, Joe Biden’s first hundred days in office would have looked very different.
On Thursday, Jonathan Alter, the author of The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, said: “Without the Georgia runoffs, you would not have that transformational presidency. It would be a completely different story. If 6 January is an important date in American history, so is 5 January because of those Georgia runoffs and none of what’s happening would be possible without 5 January.”
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