THERE ARE 10 DAYS until Election Day. 88 DAYS until Inauguration Day. Covid relief remains undone (NYT's Emily Cochrane on that). Both candidates will cross America over the next week. BUT THE MOST IMPORTANT CONVERSATION happened on POD SAVE AMERICA, where JOE BIDEN laid out his first term priorities in a conversation with DAN PFEIFFER and JON LOVETT. PAY ATTENTION to what BIDEN is talking about: infrastructure and other types of investment spending, and defeating the coronavirus. To our ears, this is the most in-depth statement of priorities we've heard from BIDEN. BIDEN: "GET CONTROL OF THE VIRUS . Get control of coronavirus. Without that, nothing else is going to work very well, number one. Number two: invest in the community, in real infrastructure. He's been promising to invest in infrastructure in '17, '18, '19, '20. He hasn't done a single, solitary thing. So we're going to invest in generating economic growth in the United States by making it and buying it. Buy it in America, made in America. He is exporting jobs overseas. "The first thing we're going to have to do is to, in order to compete internationally, is we're going to have to compete. We used to have, we used to invest a little over two point six percent of our GDP [in] research and science. It's now down to point six percent. We're going to invest in science and technology. We're going to make sure that we can compete with the rest of the world and lead the rest of the world. We have the greatest institutes. We have more great research universities in the United States of America than every other research university in the entire rest of the world combined. "And the good news is, the people own them. They are not private institutions. Los Alamos is owned by a university. It is a university. The people own these systems and we so underestimate. That's where every major breakthrough has come out in the last twenty five years. And we're going to invest in those. We're going to continue to invest in the research and development. And it's going to go from making sure we have access to know how we're going to generate economic growth through infrastructure that is green as well as we're going to invest five billion dollars a year in cancer research." The full episode … Full transcript of Lovett and Pfeiffer with Biden HOW BIDEN'S OIL REMARK IS PLAYING … Denver Post: "Biden's warning on oil tests voter resolve" … Dallas Morning News: "GOP drills Biden over oil remark" … Houston Chronicle: "Trump puts oil on the ballot in Texas race" -- HOLLY OTTERBEIN, BEN LEFEBVRE and ZACK COLMAN: "Biden's oil slip gives Trump campaign hope in Pa., Texas" THE FRONTS: NYT, with another terrific TRUMP tax story on the front page … WAPO, with the Israel-Sudan deal on A1, and a story about a new record for Covid cases … WSJ, with JEFF ZUCKER story on the front WHAT AMERICA IS READING … THE NATION'S FRONTS: Arizona Republic: "Spike in virus deaths possible … Immigration finally comes up in last Trump-Biden debate" … San Jose Mercury News: "FDA DEBATES USE OF 'EMERGENCY' VACCINE" … … Miami Herald: "Obama and Trump will get out the vote today in South Florida" … Pensacola News Journal: "Trump supporters flock to Pensacola from across USA" … Tampa Bay Times: "For Villages people: greatest hits" … The Villages Daily Sun: "Fabs Cheer Trump's Return to The Villages" … … Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "Big changes to health law back on table" … Detroit Free Press: "Cases surge, are deaths next?" … Star Tribune (Minneapolis): "Boogaloo linked to 3rd Precinct assault" Happy Saturday. THE NEW BUZZ IN THE CAPITOL … BURGESS EVERETT and HEATHER CAYGLE: "Scarred Democrats begin accepting a possible Biden win": Four months ago, Sen. Sherrod Brown predicted Joe Biden will win Ohio and with it, the presidency in a romp. President Donald Trump has ticked up in the state's polls, but Brown is undeterred. "'I feel stronger about that than I did then,' the Ohio Democrat said in an interview, touting his state's party infrastructure. 'This culture of corruption coupled with Trump's betrayal of workers says we win Ohio. Win Ohio, we certainly win Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, right? … Ohio with those three is close to an Electoral College landslide and it will feel that way.' "Certainly Brown is more confident than many Democrats still scarred from Hillary Clinton's surprise loss in 2016. But it turns out that more and more Democrats are coming along to his sunny view of things as the election creeps ever-closer. "That's not to say feeling upbeat comes naturally to Democrats. Or as Missouri Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver put it: 'Every time I get too happy I slap myself and stick my hand over a fire.' 'I'm a nervous ninny,' Cleaver added. 'I read the polls … but I'm scared to feel like we're going to win because we've seen what happened in 2016.'" YEP! … THE BEST LEAD OF THE DAY: NYT'S HELENE COOPER and ERIC SCHMITT: "Throughout the long corridors of the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper is widely seen as a dead man walking." MUST READ MARK LEIBOVICH of the NYT on IVANKA TRUMP from Franklin, Wis.: "While Her Father Rails Against 'Idiot' Scientists, Ivanka Trump Talks Ice Cream" : "President Trump had just been on Fox and Friends, demanding that his attorney general 'act' against his opponent before the election. He had, the day before, called Joseph R. Biden Jr. a 'criminal,' Dr. Anthony S. Fauci a 'disaster,' government scientists "idiots" and members of the media "real garbage." "Ivanka Trump, meanwhile, was visiting suburban Milwaukee and here for none of this. 'I learned that the first ice cream sundae was created in this amazing state!' the president's older daughter and senior White House adviser said from a small stage of a sunlit function room overlooking a pond. There would be no mentions of Hunter Biden in here, no reference to Hillary Clinton, 'Barack Hussein Obama,' China Virus, witch hunts, fake news, Antifa or rigged elections." TRUMP TOUTS THE OBAMA AGENDA … WAPO'S ASHLEY PARKER: "Spin, hyperbole and deception: How Trump claimed credit for an Obama veterans achievement": "The first time President Trump claimed false credit for the Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act — which President Barack Obama signed into law in 2014 — was on June 6, 2018. That day, as Trump signed the Mission Act, a modest update to the bipartisan VA Choice legislation, he seemed to conflate the two. "In the coming weeks, Trump began systematically erasing from the legislation's history not just Obama but also the late senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), who not only co-sponsored the VA Choice Act but also was so instrumental in passing the Mission Act that he is one of three senators for whom the act is officially named." L.A. TIMES FRONT PAGE: "Mike Pence's Indiana hometown built by a different kind of Republican," by James Rainey in Columbus, Indiana: "The vice president who likes to say he is "a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order," claims deep roots and loyalties in the small, ambitious city of about 48,000 where he grew up. But in an adulthood that has taken him mostly to Indianapolis and Washington, he returns now to a hometown growing in unexpected and often progressive directions." TRUMP INC. IN TROUBLE? … WAPO: "Loan payments loom as Trump fights for his political future – and the future of his business," by David Fahrenthold, Jonathan O'Connell and Joshua Partlow: "At President Trump's hotel in Chicago, the most recent board meeting began with bad news. This year's numbers were awful. Revenue had plunged. The hotel was just 24 percent occupied. "And worse: The hotel expected next year to be bad, too. In fact, the hotel's managing director, Gabriel Constantin, said the coronavirus pandemic had hurt the Trump hotel so deeply — reducing business travel and forcing the cancellation of Chicago conferences — that it might be nine years before their business returned to 2019 levels. "'The most optimistic [date] would be 2024,' Constantin said, according to an account of the meeting obtained by The Washington Post. He had a warning about the hotel's future, if the pandemic's economic effects didn't ease: 'It's going to be very, very tough to keep the boat afloat.'" TIM ALBERTA'S BIG PICTURE: "The Unspectacular Excellence of Joe Biden's Slow and Steady Campaign" MAYA KING was with KAMALA HARRIS in Atlanta. TRUMP TO LANSING, MICH., NEXT WEEK, per the Freep. FRONT PAGE OF THE MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL: "Mitchell Airport refused Trump campaign rally" THE PRESIDENT'S SATURDAY … THE PRESIDENT voted in West Palm Beach, and then will head to the airport at 9:50 a.m. for a flight to Fayetteville, N.C. He'll then go to Lumberton, N.C., for a speech at 12:30 p.m. At 2 p.m., he'll fly to Columbus, Ohio, for a speech in Circleville, Ohio, at 4 p.m. He'll travel to Columbus at 5:20 p.m. for a flight to Milwaukee, where he'll land at 6:15 p.m., for a speech in Waukesha. He'll leave Milwaukee for D.C. at 9 p.m. He'll arrive at the White House at 12:15 a.m. VP MIKE PENCE will leave D.C. at 1:50 p.m. for Lakeland, Fla., and Tallahassee, Fla., for rallies. JOE BIDEN: JOE and JILL BIDEN will go to Pennsylvania for a speech, and then will head to a drive-in event in Bucks County and then, JON BON JOVI will join the BIDENS for an event in Luzerne County. KAMALA HARRIS will travel to Cleveland for an early vote launch mobilization event, and then will hold virtual fundraisers. BARACK OBAMA will be in Orlando and Miami. | 
