South Carolina: A Year Later

A year ago, I stood in Columbia, South Carolina, grateful that the voters of the Palmetto State–and especially the backbone of the Democratic Party, the African-American community–had set us on a course to the presidency.
That night, I said that ours was a campaign for the people who had been knocked down, counted out, and left behind. I spoke about the cost of anger and division in the country and the need to unite America.
That night, as I prepared to speak, the United States confirmed our 69th coronavirus case. As a nation, we were just beginning to understand how much our lives would soon be upended.
The world has changed dramatically in the past year. Our nation has begun to grapple with a long-overdue reckoning on racial justice. Our democracy endured a violent insurrection in our Capitol. As a people, we mourned the more than a half million lives lost to COVID-19, and the economic devastation that has hammered so many more families, small businesses, and communities. Add to that the increasing need to confront our changing climate, and it is a confluence of crises perhaps unprecedented in our history.
And yet, as much as the world has changed, the challenges I outlined that night have only become more urgent.
Millions of Americans have lost their jobs as a result of the COVID-19 recession. Our cities and towns have shed 1.3 million jobs since last March; educators, nurses, police officers, firefighters, and other essential public workers have been pushed to the brink. 400,000 small businesses have closed their doors, forever.
The economic toll from the pandemic continues to tear through our country as brutally as the virus itself.
We see the damage in ways we never expected to see in this country — lines of cars, miles long, at food banks. In early February, one in every seven adults with children in this country reported that they didn’t have sufficient food.
We’ve seen women’s participation in the workforce driven to its lowest level in more than three decades, as so many women are facing the devastating choice between a paycheck and the care and education of a child.
In the past year, we have been tested like never before. And now, we are responding.
Confronting COVID-19 has required both a miracle of science and a miracle of manufacturing, yielding three effective vaccines to date. Now, it requires the greatest operational undertaking in our history: getting shots into the arms of hundreds of millions of Americans.
I set a goal of 100 million shots in my first 100 days. To achieve it, we’re bringing back retired doctors and nurses as vaccinators, deploying health professionals from the military and our commissioned medical corps, and setting up and supporting new and expanded vaccination sites. As a result, we are well ahead of our goal — hitting the halfway mark in just 37 days.
We are also making progress on the economic healing our nation needs.
Late Friday night, the House of Representatives passed my American Rescue Plan. This puts us one step closer to vaccinating the nation; getting state and local governments the support they need to avoid massive layoffs; putting an additional $1,400 into the pockets of Americans in the form of direct payments; increasing and extending unemployment benefits for millions of Americans who are out of work due to no fault of their own; helping millions of Americans feed their families and keep a roof over their heads; and getting our kids safely back in school.
Every aspect of the American Rescue Plan addresses a desperate need, and that is why we’re seeing massive support for it among mayors and governors of both parties, and the vast majority of the American people.
And as essential as this is, it is just the start.
The Wall Street firm Moody’s estimates that the American Rescue Plan will help the economy create more than 7 million jobs just in this year alone. That would be on the way to the more than 18 million jobs Moody’s estimates would be created over the next four years with our Build Back Better Recovery Plan.
In delivering his endorsement of my candidacy, Congressman Jim Clyburn spoke about how what was at stake for the country was “the goodness of America”. He said America was great because our people were good. And we could never lose that.
We need to remember, in this moment where there is still so much pain across the country, that we have a responsibility to lift our fellow Americans up, not leave them hungry, jobless, out in the cold. That we are called to treat everyone with dignity and respect. That the inequities and injustices laid bare by the pandemic and economic crises of the past year have made it more urgent than ever for us to finally live up to the founding principles of this nation — that everyone is created equal and is entitled to be treated equally throughout life.
And we know that we must apply those principles in everything we do — from recovering from the pandemic to rebuilding our economy, to reasserting America’s leadership in the world.
As I look back on what happened in South Carolina one year ago, it’s amazing how much can change in a day, never mind a whole year. My hope is that a year from now, Americans are able to look back and marvel at how much has changed — in their lives and in our economy — for the better.
Joe Biden
Senator, Vice President, 2020 candidate for President, husband to Jill, proud father and grandfather. Join our campaign: JoeBiden.com. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .