FORMER US president Barack Obama excoriated Donald Trump and warned yesterday against complacency despite favourable opinion polls during his first public rally in support of Democratic challenger Joe Biden ahead of the November 3 elections.

At the drive-in rally in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, one of a handful of battleground states expected to decide the election, Obama lashed out at Trump’s behaviour and declared him “incapable of taking the job seriously”.

But he also issued a stark reminder of 2016, when opinion polls showed Hillary Clinton as the clear favourite – only for her and her supporters to be shocked by a Trump victory on election day.

“We can’t be complacent. I don’t care about the polls,” the former two-term president told the rally outside a baseball stadium.

“There were a whole bunch of polls last time. Didn’t work out. Because a whole bunch of folks stayed at home. And got lazy and complacent. Not this time. Not in this election.”

He told supporters that too much was at stake to have four more years of Trump leading the nation, seeking to contrast his successor – a Republican real estate mogul and ex-reality TV star – with his former vice-president.

“This is not a reality show. This is reality,” Obama said.

“And the rest of us have had to live with the consequences of him proving himself incapable of taking the job seriously.”

He pointed to Trump’s running roughshod over previous norms, including his retweets of conspiracy theories, and accused him of mishandling the US response to the coronavirus pandemic.

“Our democracy’s not going to work if the people who are supposed to be our leaders lie every day and just make things up,” he said.

“And we just become numb to it.”

Earlier, at a roundtable with black community organisers in Philadelphia, he said “the pandemic would have been tough for any president, we haven’t seen something like this for 100 years.”

The coronavirus has killed more than 220,000 people in the United States and seriously wounded the world’s largest economy, prompting fierce criticism of the president’s handling of the crisis.

“We can’t afford another four years of this,” Obama said.

While Obama was in Pennsylvania, Trump visited North Carolina, another of the battleground states, where he riled up the crowd with popular campaign themes, such as his law-and-order platform.

“If Biden wins, the flag-burning demonstrators in the street will be running your federal government,” Trump told spectators gathered at a municipal airport in the city of Gastonia.

Biden is ahead of Trump by 2.3 percentage points in the state, according to a polling average by RealClearPolitics.

A Quinnipiac University poll of likely voters released yesterday gave Biden a 51-43 lead in Pennsylvania, which Trump won by a narrow margin in 2016.

Trump is trailing Biden in the national polls, and another Quinnipiac poll spelled potential trouble for his re-election hopes. – AFP, October 22, 2020.