Biden’s Early Rise or Fall Rides on Georgia

WASHINGTON — Can blue lightning strike twice in the red clay ground of Georgia? You tell me, Scarlett.

Much is at stake, like the fate of the nation, if the state elects two Democrats to the Senate on Jan. 5. President-elect Joe Biden carried Georgia and hopes a special runoff will hand him a working majority in the Senate. Barely.

If Georgia voters choose the two challengers, the Senate will be a 50-50 battleground, a civil war revisited. Biden will be able to pass legislation without a single Republican vote. A tie is as good as a win, because the vice president breaks it. Floor control would shift to the Democrats.

Even so, Biden cannot claim a national mandate. Democrats lost seats in the House and Republicans defended their dominance in the nation’s statehouses. Ironically, Biden was in the Senate for 35 years, yet it may betray the genial Delaware Democrat when the chips are down.

That’s American tragedy for you.

Biden must do big things from the start to save the country from a long, dark winter. He takes the reins in a rare “crisis presidency,” which means stepping into a storm like a great war or depression and leading the nation through it.

First, the new president needs Congress to pass a titanic stimulus package to pump into households and the economy. He also needs a clear central public health plan for giving out the COVID-19 vaccine, not the state hopscotch chalk pattern we’ve seen in the coronavirus crisis so far.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt braced for the Great Depression the very day he was sworn in. Times are harder now, with a double crisis facing Biden: the global pandemic and an economy a shadow of its usual self, with hunger and unemployment rising.

Americans are not used to feeling so down on their luck. Schoolchildren are missing their friends. Woman — and man — does not live on Zoom alone. It’s been miserable since mid-march, with little joys and pleasures of life gone. Families have suffered irreplaceable losses of loved ones.

Biden might count the outgoing president’s ongoing “sulkstorm” as a third crisis. The worst paranoid loser ever, Donald Trump’s refusing to concede election results is a bad omen, shaking confidence in American democracy. That’s his aim, with malice aforethought: to tear the body politic into pieces.

Trump has thrown shade on Georgia’s governor and vote count, which might backfire for his party in the worst way. It’s not clear he cares that if the Senate goes to 50-50, Democrats will have the upper hand.

Make or break time might come calling early in the new year for Biden’s presidency.

Biden’s win in Georgia surprised some observers. That gives a reason to believe that a Democratic pair, the Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, could win runoffs on the same January day. They are real contenders, in debate and oratory. Warnock preaches at Martin Luther King Jr.’s former pulpit at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.

The Georgia Republican senators in the race are weak. Kelly Loeffler has never run a big campaign before; she was appointed. David Perdue is being investigated for questionable stock sales.

Republican voter turnout could be depressed in Georgia at this crucial moment because of Trump’s trash talk about officials there. If he visits Saturday, as planned, the drama will deepen.

Whatever happens, Biden will work with divided House and Senate chambers with slim Democratic majorities, if he’s lucky. Emergency measures must be sweeping to revive the nation. They are sure to pass the House, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-calif., urged another COVID-19 bill all summer and fall.

But then there’s the slow Senate. With Kentucky Republican Mitch Mcconnell as majority leader, it does little all day long but stock the federal judiciary like a fishpond.

Mcconnell, unblinking, insists an economic recovery is a just a matter of billions. Biden and Pelosi will seek a package somewhere in the trillions.

In bygone days, the giants of the Senate would have a vigorous floor debate and reach a bipartisan accord. Biden once walked among giants.

As president, can Biden do big things with a small-minded, small-spending Senate? You tell me — and Georgia.