44 Time December 21/December 28, 2020
2020 Person of the Year
Joe Biden and Kamala
Harris, President-Elect
and Vice President–Elect
of the United States
To geT pasT The sTage-door enTrance of The Queen TheaTer,
you need a negative COVID-19 test and a particular type of N95
mask. You have to promise not to eat or drink inside, and answer a
questionnaire about your recent whereabouts, and then comes the
Secret Service protocol (the sweep, the wands). Once you’re in, the
floors normally sticky with spilled drinks are instead dotted with
distance-marking tape for reasons that are obvious: this is where
President-elect Joe Biden is basing his transition, and President-
elect Biden takes COVID-19 very, very seriously.
“They told me we were gonna lose the campaign because of all
this, remember?” Biden says in a Dec. 7 interview, gesturing at the
precautions from a brown leather chair in a room above the stage.
But “the good news,” Biden smiles, is he and his team “didn’t lis-
ten to anybody.” Like all such venues these days, the historic Wilm-
ington, Del., playhouse is silent and empty. Instead of concerts, its
fading green-and-red murals look down on a new production that’s
opened out of town: a semicircle of blue-draped tables surrounding
a lectern before a screen projecting the seal of the President-elect of
the United States. Upstairs, Biden keeps a 16-ft. distance from every-
one as he makes final preparations to take on the role of a lifetime.
As Biden sees it, trusting his instincts and tuning out the nay-
sayers is a big reason why he’s going to be the next Commander in
Chief. They said he was too old, too unsteady, too boring. That his
pledge to restore the “soul of the nation” felt like antiquated hokum
at a moment when Hurricane Trump was tearing through America,
ripping through institutions, chewing up norms and spitting them
out. “I got widely criticized,” Biden recalls, for “saying that we had
to not greet Trump with a clenched fist but with more of an open
hand. That we weren’t going to respond to hate with hate.” To him,
it wasn’t about fighting Trump with righteous vengeance, or probing
Biden and Harris
onstage in
Wilmington, Del.,
at the end of the
Democratic National
Convention, which
was held virtually
because of the
pandemicBy Charlotte Alter