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      Ruth Ann Minner, Down-to-Earth Governor of Delaware, Dies at 86

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      The first woman in that position, she rose from being a receptionist in the governor’s office to claiming the top job herself.Ruth Ann Minner, who was raised by a sharecropper and dropped out of high school but went on to become the first and only woman to serve as governor of Delaware, died on Thursday at the Delaware Hospice Center in Milford. She was 86. The cause was complications of a fall, said Lisa Peel, one of her granddaughters.One of the last public events she attended was President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory celebration in Wilmington in November 2020. He called out her name from the stage before he began his speech, and he had been in touch with the family in recent days.Ms. Minner, a middle-of-the-road Democrat who was conservative on fiscal matters and progressive on social issues, served as governor from 2001 to 2009. A strong promoter of health care and a clean environment, she made headlines in 2002 for successfully pushing through one of the nation’s first smoking bans in public places, despite fierce opposition from many in Delaware’s powerful business community.She also successfully pushed for several education initiatives, including the first scholarship program in the nation to offer free college access to students who kept up their grades and stayed out of trouble. She implemented full-day kindergarten as well.Her other signal achievement was preserving and protecting the state’s open spaces, particularly its farmland and forests.Known for her no-nonsense approach and lack of pretense, Ms. Minner, who grew up during the Depression in a rural coastal area on the Delaware Bay, brought a down-to-earth style to the state capitol in Dover, where a political columnist called her the “Aunt Bee” of state government, a reference to the family matriarch on “The Andy Griffith Show.”“She was a leader who had a real common touch,” Gov. John Carney, who served as her lieutenant governor, said in a statement. Having grown up poor, he added, “she brought that perspective to her job every day, and she never lost her attachment to those roots.”Breaking the gender barrier when she was elected governor was not important to her, Ms. Minner told The Associated Press in 2000.“I’ve found out since the election, though, that it does matter to a lot of women,” she added. “It matters to a lot of young girls.”Ms. Minner in 2004 with John Carney, her lieutenant governor, after narrowly winning a second term.Pat Crowe II/Associated PressRuth Ann Coverdale was born on Jan. 17, 1935, in Milford, Del., the youngest of five children, and was raised in nearby Slaughter Neck. Her father, Samuel Coverdale, was a sharecropper, and her mother, Mary Ann (Lewis) Coverdale, was a homemaker.She left high school at 16 to work on the family farm. At 17 she married Frank R. Ingram, her junior high school sweetheart. The couple had three sons.Mr. Ingram died of a heart attack at 34 in 1967. In 1969 she married Roger Minner, with whom she operated a car-towing business. He died of cancer in 1991.She is survived by two sons, Frank Ingram Jr. and Wayne Ingram; seven grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren. Her son Gary L. Ingram died in 2016.Having dropped out of high school, Ms. Minner was determined to make something of herself — and to show her sons that dropping out was not OK.She started by earning her high school equivalency diploma while working as a statistician with the Maryland Crop Reporting Service. She briefly attended Delaware Technical and Community College before landing a job as a clerk in the Delaware House of Representatives, where, she told The New York Times in 2001, she was able to study the ins and outs of statehouse politicking.She transferred to an office job with Sherman W. Tribbitt, a state representative. When he was elected governor in 1972, he brought her along as his receptionist. And then she ran for office herself.“I never had any intention of getting deeply involved in politics,” Ms. Minner told The Times. “But it finally got down to proving some things to myself.”She was elected to the State House in 1974. After eight years there and nearly a decade in the State Senate, she ran for lieutenant governor in 1992, with Thomas R. Carper at the top of the ticket. They won. In 2000, after two terms as governor, Mr. Carper was elected to the U.S. Senate and Ms. Minner was elected governor, winning 60 percent of the vote.By then, “she had become comfortable with being the only woman in the room,” Dr. Peel, her granddaughter, said in an interview. And Ms. Minner was one to stick to her guns, she said, to the point of being stubborn. When she made up her mind, there was no arguing with her.She faced a tough re-election fight four years later; after difficult battles with the legislature and scandals involving the state police and prison system, she squeaked into her second term with 51 percent of the vote.As Ms. Minner prepared to leave the governor’s office in 2009, Mr. Biden, who had just been elected vice president, participated in a tribute to her, at which he recalled her bruising fight to enact the ban on smoking in public places.“When we were watching your poll numbers falling precipitously, you did not budge,” he told her. “You were willing to risk your political life to get it done.”He added: “In this business of politics, the most important question is, what are you willing to lose over? If you can’t answer that question, then it’s all about ego and power and not about principle.” More

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      In Delaware, Biden Indulges One of His Oldest Habits: Commuting

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      Still adjusting to the White House, the president sees Delaware as a place where he can be on display but still have his privacy protected.REHOBOTH BEACH, Del. — Everyone here has a Biden story.Joe Mack, who owns the Double Dippers ice cream parlor, says President Biden likes to recite old Irish sayings when he comes in to grab a quart of chocolate chip. Susan Kehoe, the owner of Browseabout Books, says Mr. Biden and his dog Champ draw crowds of onlookers when they relax on one of the benches outside the store.Kathleen McGuiness, the Delaware state auditor, has a photograph on her phone of her standing next to an aviators-wearing Mr. Biden near Rehoboth Avenue, the town’s main drag.“They fit into the fabric,” Ms. McGuiness said of the president and his brood, who summered here for years before Mr. Biden bought a $2.7 million beach home in 2017 in the North Shores, a tony neighborhood one mile north of town.Before the 2020 election, the Bidens were often a fixture downtown, the former vice president often tangling up people in conversations that sometimes had no end in sight.“He wandered freely,” Mr. Mack said.As president, Mr. Biden has made it clear with public comments — he has compared life in the White House to living in a “gilded cage” — and the frequency of his travel that he is still most comfortable in Delaware, a place where he can be on display and protected all at once.The Bidens own a large home in a suburb of Wilmington, but Rehoboth, a laid-back beach town that sells French fries by the bucket and Biden-theme merchandise — including orange Gatorade-scented candles, crafted in homage to the president’s preferred drink — is one of his favorite havens. In the middle of tense negotiations with Republicans over an infrastructure package, mushrooming ransomware attacks against American companies, and plans for a coming trip to the Group of 7 summit in Europe, Mr. Biden departed for the beach to celebrate the 70th birthday of Jill Biden, the first lady.Mr. Biden’s inclination to go home to Delaware is longstanding: During his 36 years in the Senate, Mr. Biden made it a point to travel back to Wilmington to spend most evenings with his sons, a habit that began after his first wife, Neilia Biden, and young daughter, Naomi Biden, were killed in a car accident.At least for now, the Bidens have another reason: They do not yet fully trust the residence staff and security officials they did not directly hire, according to two people familiar with their thinking. (Many of the household employees are holdovers from the previous administration, which is common for new presidents.) The Bidens still have not installed a White House chief usher, who manages the residence. The Trumps’ chief usher, who was a former rooms manager of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, was fired on Inauguration Day.Eric Johnson, a native of Rehoboth, with a cutout likeness of Mr. Biden. The town is one of the president’s favorite havens.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesFor the Bidens, the White House has taken some adjustment. Delaware, on the other hand, takes almost none. Their home in Rehoboth was purchased after the president promised his wife that he would buy her a beach house with proceeds from a multimillion-dollar book deal signed after he left the vice presidency. (A plaque above the front door reads “A Promise Kept.”)“I wanted it to be the kind of place where you can come in in your wet bathing suit and bare feet and I can just take the broom and brush out the sand,” Dr. Biden told Vogue in 2020. “And that’s what this is. Everything’s easy.”On Thursday, a bike ride the couple took at the state park near their home stretched much longer than expected because the president kept stopping to talk to people, according to a person familiar with their activities. The first couple kept a low profile, though the townspeople were comparing notes about where the first couple might turn up.At DiFebo’s, an Italian restaurant that is a favorite of Mr. Biden’s, patrons hoped the president would drop in for his favorite dish, chicken Parmesan with red sauce. (The first lady usually orders the salmon.) At the Ice Cream Store, a parlor near the boardwalk, tubs of Biden’s Summer White House Cherry sat waiting for consumption.Not this visit. On a wooded lane in the neighborhood where Mr. Biden lives, law enforcement officials in black S.U.V.s restricted the flow of traffic. A Coast Guard ship in the ocean and the sight of burly Secret Service agents in summer wear were the only giveaways that the president was even in town.When Mr. Biden and Dr. Biden returned to the capital, it was a rare reversal of a typical week for them. Aside from the trip this week to Rehoboth — his first as president — Mr. Biden has spent nine weekends at his home in Wilmington, and five at Camp David, the Maryland presidential retreat, according to a review of his schedule. Mr. Biden has swapped the train for Air Force One, sometimes leaving Washington on short notice for even shorter trips: Last week, he flew back to Wilmington for the afternoon to attend the funeral of a longtime aide.Mr. Biden arrived in Rehoboth Beach via helicopter this week. He bought a home in Rehoboth after he promised Ms. Biden that he would purchase a beach house with proceeds from a multimillion-dollar book deal signed after he left the vice presidency.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesNaturally, the fact that Mr. Biden enjoys coming back to Delaware — even in the middle of a presidential workweek — did not seem to surprise residents here.“I think he knows his way around Washington and he’s pretty familiar with what he needs to do and where he needs to be,” Ms. McGuiness, who has known the Bidens for years — her sister used to babysit for the family — said in an interview. “Making a quick travel to the Wilmington home or Rehoboth home makes sense for someone who puts family as a priority.”Mr. Biden’s trip this week to Rehoboth was his first as president, and he has spent nine weekends at his home in Wilmington, and five at Camp David, according to a review of his schedule. Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesThe first lady often spends less time in Washington during the week than Mr. Biden does. Before his travel weekends, Dr. Biden sometimes heads separately to one of the family homes in Delaware, or meets up with extended family at Camp David. She has also traveled alone to Rehoboth. Ms. Kehoe, the owner of Browseabout Books, said the Bidens were generally treated as part of the scenery.“We try to treat them as if they were any other customer,” Ms. Kehoe said. “Which is a good thing for us.”Convention suggests that presidents should stay close to Washington and be judicious with taxpayer-funded travel, but that concept was tested to its limit with President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Trump spent over 417 days at one of his properties, a travel habit that blurred the line between his family business and presidential duties. Mr. Trump enjoyed the perks of being president, including the staff, the ceremonies, the planes and the presidential limo. Many of those perks are long familiar to Mr. Biden — he had a similar apparatus around him for eight years as Barack Obama’s vice president — but he has said the trappings that come with the presidency have made him uncomfortable.“I don’t know about you all, but I was raised in the way that you didn’t look for anybody to wait on you,” Mr. Biden said of life in the White House during a town-hall-style interview with CNN in February. “I find myself extremely self-conscious.”A Secret Service agent and a Delaware State Police officer on the beach. During his 36 years in the Senate, Mr. Biden made it a point to travel back to Wilmington to spend most evenings with his sons.Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times More

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      in US Politics

      'It's put Delaware on the map': Biden’s win drags state from the shadows

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      It is not so much a flyover state as a does-the-train-have-to-stop-here? state. Most travellers between New York and Washington do not disembark at the Joseph R Biden Jr Railroad Station in Wilmington, Delaware. Perhaps they will now take a second look.The station is where Biden launched his first, ill-fated campaign for US president in June 1987 and where, standing on a deserted platform 33 years later, proud local Democrats cast the votes that clinched his nomination at a virtual convention. Now, with Biden as president-elect, this unglamorous station, city and state are enjoying a rare moment in the sun.“If there’s anything that people know about Wilmington it’s that there’s an Amtrak station,” said Xavier Teixido, a local restaurateur who has served Biden often. “We don’t really have an airport of any note but the Amtrak station is like our airport. Every Acela [train] that comes up and down the east coast stops in Wilmington, Delaware, and I think there’s a reason for that. It’s probably Joe and our other senators that commute to work.”Delaware is the second smallest state in the union after Rhode Island. It does not have a professional sports team, signature cuisine or claim to fame except as a corporate tax haven. Wilmington, founded by Swedes in 1638, was long dominated by credit card companies and the chemical giant DuPont. Biden does not have much competition as Delaware’s most famous man.Caesar Rodney, who signed the declaration of independence, is described by the History Channel’s website as “the founding father you’ve probably never heard of”. A slave owner, his statue was removed from Wilmington’s Rodney Square this summer amid the uprising over racial injustice.John Eleuthère du Pont built Delaware’s natural history museum to display his collections of 66,000 birds and 2m seashells. He was also a wrestling enthusiast who shot dead an Olympic champion in 1996 and spent the rest of his life in prison (the story was given a chilly retelling in the film Foxcatcher starring Steve Carell).A recent New York Times article argued that Wilmington, which has a population of just 72,000, has spent centuries in obscurity and long struggled to define its identity, with officials devising earnest slogans such as “A Place to Be Somebody”, then “Wilmington, in the middle of it all” and most recently. “It’s Time”.But with Biden, it can finally call one of its own “Mr President”. His victory speech at the Chase Center on the Riverfront, and his transition events unveiling cabinet picks at the Queen theatre, have drawn thousands of supporters and journalists. Suddenly thrust centre stage, the city and state are emerging – at least momentarily – from the daunting shadow of New York, Washington and neighbouring Philadelphia.Teixido, owner of Harry’s Savoy Grill and Kid Shelleen’s Charcoal House & Saloon, said: “I really do think it’s put Delaware on the map.”Teixido, 67, was born in Paraguay but grew up in Wilmington and after, a few years in Philadelphia and New Orleans, came back for good. “It’s going to be ‘reporting from Wilmington, Delaware’ or ‘Joe Biden did this’ or ‘These people came to Wilmington’,” he predicted. “I’m sure he’s proud of this state and he’s going to show it off the best he can. At a time that things seem so dark and so bleak, it’s nice to have a little light shone on the place that you live and work. Not everyone has that.”The aura of the presidency can lift small-town America out of obscurity. Dwight Eisenhower, from Abilene, Kansas, once remarked: “The proudest thing I can claim is that I am from Abilene.” Jimmy Carter still lives in Plains, the small Georgia farm town where he was born, and Bill Clinton, from Hope, Arkansas, accepted the 1992 Democratic nomination by declaring: “I still believe in a place called Hope.”Now it is the turn of Biden’s modest home to get name-checked on the nightly news. Michael Purzycki, the Democratic mayor of Wilmington, said: “Joe’s being elected has created this curiosity about Wilmington that people just never had before. All of a sudden, there’s mystique about Wilmington. Here he is broadcasting from the Queen – where’s the Queen? What’s on Market Street? What are the restaurants down there? What’s special about this place? Where does Joe live? Where did he grow up?”It might be said to be fitting that Donald Trump – whose brash personality is reflected by garish Trump Tower in New York and opulent Mar-a-Lago in Florida – is about to be supplanted by a man who honed his common touch in Delaware, a low-key state whose riches are less instantly obvious. The place is a measure of a man.Purzycki, 75, who shared a dormitory with Biden at the University of Delaware and was a classmate of his sister, added: “Joe can expound on subjects but he’s a modest person, he’s not a person with this massive ego that needs to be stroked all the time and I think if you could take a look at our state, we’re an understated place.“Our train station is small, our convention space is much smaller than you find in the big cities. We have an intimate scale to the city, which I think is a pretty accurate reflection of Joe Biden.”In fact Biden was born in Scranton, a hardscrabble city in neighbouring Pennsylvania, but when he was 10, his father moved the family to Delaware to work as a car salesman. Biden went on to represent the state for 36 years in the US Senate, famously commuting by train, before becoming Barack Obama’s vice-president.The size of the state was ideal for Biden to hone his style of retail politics; it does not take long to find someone whom he has looked in the eye or whose hand he has shaken. Local activist Coby Owens noted that his uncle, Herman Holloway Sr, Delaware’s first Black legislator, was a close acquaintance of the future president.Owens said: “Because we’re a small city, I feel as though we’re connected. We have a very strong sense of self and unity. Everyone knows each other. In some neighbourhoods in the big cities you grew up on your block so you know people on your block. In the city of Wilmington, you know people throughout the city and that’s one of the unique things.”Although Biden’s vice-presidency was something of a dress rehearsal, Owens, 25, has already noticed an increase in TV crews, Secret Service agents and the Biden motorcade, as well as supporters eager to pay homage. “It’s cool to see that we are literally the centre of democracy right now and, each time he rolls out a new cabinet member, having them come to Wilmington and speak here just brings joy to my heart.”For the out-of-towners, what else is there do to? Owens suggests attractions including beaches in Sussex county, picturesque churches and parks and the Christiana shopping mall, which includes a popular Apple store. “But we don’t have an Empire State building, we don’t have a Rockefeller. In Washington you have the monuments; we don’t have that here. So I think it’s less of a draw towards that and more a draw towards the shopping and the vacation areas.”Delaware does boast DuPont family mansions, museums and gardens that are open to visitors. Local tourism officials are also hoping for a post-pandemic boom courtesy of their local hero. Liz Keller, director of the Delaware Tourism Office, which has one of the smallest budgets of any such office in the country, admitted that “we can’t buy the type of media exposure” that comes from Biden’s election.“It 100% has benefited our state tourism industry and we’re definitely looking forward to welcoming people and also sharing with them some of the Biden favourite spots: some of the dining locations that we know the family likes to visit to get a taste of Delaware.”It is surely only a matter of time before a Biden statue is erected, perhaps at the railway station he made famous. But some residents are still rather skeptical about the state’s tourism charms.Cris Barrish, 62, a veteran newspaper journalist now based in PBS affiliate WHYY’s Wilmington office, said: “I’ve travelled to Europe, I’ve been up the east coast a lot, I’ve been north-west, I’ve been to Canada, I’ve been to New England and I can’t imagine wanting to be a tourist and like, ‘Let’s go to Delaware for a trip’ – unless you were going to the beach for a week. l’d put those beach towns up against almost anywhere but the Caribbean or the Mediterranean.” More

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      in US Politics

      Ever resilient, Joe Biden finally grasps his chance to lead America

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      At a moment of extraordinary tumult and pain, America has elected a man haunted by grief, with a seemingly boundless capacity for resilience, to be the country’s next president.
      Joe Biden sought the presidency twice before serving as vice-president for eight years in the Obama administration, a role that might have been the capstone of his decades in public life.
      But after the election of Donald Trump four years ago, Biden believed he had one last mission. Casting the 2020 election as a “battle for the soul of the nation”, he challenged the incumbent, and the country, on the strength of their characters.
      “Character is on the ballot,” Biden told voters again and again, as he promised to be a leader who was empathetic and decent, traits that his opponent saw as weaknesses. Biden told the nation that his life and career had taken him through extraordinary highs and unimaginable lows, and what he had learned from those experiences made him the right man to meet this moment. More

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      'We're on track to win': Biden expresses optimism as vote count continues

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      Joe Biden expressed confidence and optimism in an address to supporters on election night, as millions of votes continued to be counted and results tightened in his race for the White House against Donald Trump.
      Democratic hopes of an early landslide over Trump were dashed as the president won Florida, one of the biggest prizes of the night, raising the spectre of a drawn-out contest, legal challenges and potentially civil unrest.
      “I’m here to tell you tonight we believe we’re on track to win this election,” Biden said early on Wednesday morning, appearing relaxed in front of a packed parking lot of supporters in Wilmington, Delaware.
      “We feel good about where we are, we really do,” Biden told a cheering crowd, honking from their cars as they observed social distancing measures amid the coronavirus pandemic. “I’m here to tell you tonight we believe we’re on track to win this election.
      “We knew because of the unprecedented early vote, the mail-in vote, that it’s going to take a while, we’re going to have to be patient until the hard work of counting votes is finished. And it ain’t over till every vote is counted, every ballot is counted.” More