One week before the election, Biden promises to stem the tide of COVID-19

With seven days to go before the U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump is stepping up meetings on Tuesday in the hope of bringing about a final turnaround, while his Democratic opponent Joe Biden, who is more discreet on the ground, continues to wear him down in his management of the pandemic. 

With 67 of the more than 230 million U.S. voters having already cast ballots (one-third in person and two-thirds by mail), an all-time record, the two men are each campaigning in states normally taken for granted by Republicans, a sign of the immense challenge facing the incumbent president.

From Washington to Las Vegas, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nebraska, as usual, Donald Trump has planned the busiest day of meetings.

His rival only made one trip, to the conservative southern state of Georgia, where until recently no one would have expected Trump to be defeated.

There he followed in the footsteps of an illustrious wartime Democratic president, Franklin Roosevelt (1933-1945), to Warm Springs, where the former leader, paralyzed in the legs by polio, went for his "therapeutic waters".

"We can control the virus, and we will," said Joe Biden, making full use of a quote from Donald Trump's chief of staff, Mark Meadows, who said over the weekend: "We're not going to control the pandemic, we're going to control the fact that we can get vaccines.

"If you will grant me the honor of being your president, prepare for a shift in priorities. For we will act, from the first day of my presidency, to regain control of VIDOC," said former Vice President Barack Obama in a 20-minute outdoor speech.

Active Obama

The former real estate mogul, according to the polls that have left him behind, could have some nasty surprises on November 3 in some Republican strongholds. Among them is one of the three districts in Nebraska, which has not voted Democratic since... Barack Obama in 2008.

The latter is back on the podium for the final stretch before the election, and he resumed Tuesday his scathing indictment against the billionaire, whom he considers navel-gazing and incompetent.

"This president claims all the credit for an economy which he inherited, and rejects any responsibility for a pandemic which he ignored", launched Barack Obama in Orlando in Florida, in a new "drive-in" meeting, where the participants were in car.

He again raised the spectre of a repeat of the 2016 election, when Hillary Clinton, ahead in the polls, had finally lost to the surprise of all.

"Last time we rested on our laurels. People were a little lazy, they thought it was a sure thing, and look what happened," Barack Obama said.

Trump reinvigorated?

Those words apparently stung the lively Donald Trump, who complained about it just before getting on his helicopter in Washington.

"He's on Fox all the time," the president noted, referring to Fox News, his favorite channel.

The Republican billionaire had a clear political victory the day before: the appointment of conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court of the United States was confirmed by the Senate.

The institution will decide on major issues of American society and will also have the final say in the event of an electoral dispute, a possibility that raises concerns because the President wants to give credence to the unfounded theory that the ballot was already tainted by large-scale fraud because of the importance of postal voting.

The last week of the campaign, the last week of all dangers, could see the resurgence of an issue that has been a thorn in the side of American society: police brutality and racism against the black population, which agitated the country after the death of George Floyd at the end of May in Minneapolis.

The city of Philadelphia was the scene of an outbreak of violence on Monday night after a 27-year-old African-American man with psychological problems was shot dead by police officers.

Recent similar incidents, denounced by the Black Lives Matter movement, have elicited contrasting responses from Biden and Trump, the former promising measures to stem the injustice suffered by racial minorities, the latter condemning a chaos he said was orchestrated by Democrats.