Former President Barack Obama is delivering his final pitch to voters on behalf of Democratic presidential nominee Joseph R. Biden, telling voters in Georgia Monday that President Trump is on a “COVID spreader tour” and that the state’s GOP senators are “like Batman and Robin gone bad.”
Mr. Obama criticized Mr. Trump for signaling to his supporters that he plans to give Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a pink slip after the election.
“They’ve already said they are not going to contain the pandemic, now they are going to fire the one person who could actually help them contain the pandemic,” Mr. Obama said in Atlanta. “So Georgia, if you think they have done a bad job managing COVID so far, basically what they are telling you is you’ve seen nothing yet.”
Mr. Obama has increased his presence over the closing days of the campaign, seeking to mobilize voters in battleground states and make the case that Mr. Biden would steer the nation in a very different direction from the past four years of President Trump.
“I’ve got one word for you Atlanta: tomorrow,” Mr. Obama said during his first stop in Georgia. “Tomorrow, after four years of failure, you have the power to change America.”
“Tomorrow you can put an end to the politics that tries to divide a nation just to win an election,” he said. “That tries to stoke conspiracy theories and fear at a time when we need competence and we need hope.”
Mr. Obama said Mr. Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris would get the coronavirus pandemic under control and get the economy going again.
He said the Democrats would fight to protect people’s health care, combat climate change and strengthen the criminal justice system.
And he emphasized that voters in Georgia have the chance to play an oversized role in determining the future of the country by also electing Rev. Raphael G. Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the U.S. Senate.
Mr. Ossoff is running to unseat Sen. Dave Perdue, and Mr. Warnock is targeting Sen. Kelly Loeffler’s seat in a special election, which also features GOP Rep. Doug Collins.
Both races are tight and could be decided in runoff races next year if candidates do not secure a majority of the vote in the November election.
“Let’s face it, you’ve also got two senators that badly need to be replaced,” Mr. Obama said before taking aim at their “shady” stock deals early on in the coronavirus. “They downplayed the pandemic in public, and in private they are trying to see if they can profit from it — both of them.
“They are like Batman and Robin gone bad,” he said. “It is like the dynamic duo of doing wrong.”
Perdue spokesman John Burke pushed back against Mr. Obama’s comments.
“For Jon Ossoff, getting Barack Obama to repeat his campaign’s lies doesn’t improve his nonexistent credibility. Ossoff has staked his entire candidacy on lying to Georgia voters,” he said. “He’s hid behind big-name, out-of-state endorsements to make up for his woeful lack of experience while concealing his radical socialist agenda.”
Democrats are optimistic about their chances of winning Georgia, which they haven’t done in a presidential race since 1992.
“There is something special happening in this state. I can feel it.,” Mr. Warnock, a prominent Black preacher, said ahead of Mr. Obama’s appearance. “There is energy on the ground. There is hope on the horizon. There is change in the air.
“Beware of folks who try to frighten you into re-elected them,” he said. “The truth is they cannot lead us and so they are trying to divide us. They have no vision, so they traffic in division.”
Mr. Obama was also slated to headline another rally Monday in Miami with Luis Fonsi and DJ Irie. The voter mobilization drive-in rally in Atlanta also featured recording artists Monica and 2 Chainz.
• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.