#WhereIsJoe: Biden campaign tries to stay relevant amid coronavirus – By Daniel Strauss and Lauren Gambino (The Guardian) / March 28 2020
The Democratic frontrunner faces an unprecedented political challenge as he seeks traction while working from home
Video conferences from a basement, glitchy internet and bouts of restlessness. Joe Biden, like the rest of America, is working from home.
The former vice-president’s confinement began abruptly on 10 March, when he touched down in Cleveland for a primary-night campaign event only to learn that the state’s governor had called for all major indoor events to be canceled as the nation slowly grasped the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic.
That night, one of the most consequential of the Democratic primary, he delivered a victory speech from a nearly empty room in Philadelphia, near where his campaign is headquartered. It was his last traditional event on a campaign trail that has now changed beyond recognition.
Since then Biden, a retail politician who enjoys rope lines and now-forbidden handshakes, has become an unwilling pioneer in presidential campaigning in the age of the coronavirus as the pandemic has thrown the Democratic race – and all US politics – into confusion.
“There’s no playbook for what a former vice-president should be doing or saying in the middle of a global pandemic,” said the Democratic strategist Lis Smith, who helped catapult the former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg from obscurity to contention in the Democratic primary. “We are in uncharted waters here.”
Biden’s campaign has converted fundraising events to virtual ones and his podium is a room in his basement in his Wilmington, Delaware, home. His public appearances are usually once-a-day televised critiques of whatever Donald Trump’s administration is doing to combat the virus. His campaign has cautiously been exploring new ways to keep supporters active.
Continue to article: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/28/joe-biden-campaign-coronavirus
