Inauguration: Amid high drama Joe Biden declares democracy has arrived, unity is possible

Over the past five decades, Joe Biden endured multiple personal tragedies and saw his political obituary written over and over again — yet always found a way to pick up the pieces and move forward.

On Wednesday, he was inaugurated as the nation’s 46th president and proceeded to tell the nation it could do the same: pick up the pieces and move forward.

Simple as that sounds, in the harsh environment of 2021 it will be as tough as nearly any previous test Biden has faced.

Biden was sworn in amid extraordinary circumstances: an ongoing pandemic, the glaring absence of an outgoing president who refuse to accept the legitimacy of last year’s election, the scars of a mob attack designed to prevent him from taking office still visible on the Capitol just behind him, the nation’s first woman and first minority vice president at his side.

Joe Biden is sworn in as the 46th US President. Picture: AFP.

Kamala Harris is sworn in as Vice President as her husband Doug Emhoff looks on. Picture: AFP.

Any one of those conditions would have made the occasion historic. Put them all together and you had an inaugural unlike any America has ever seen, or is likely to see again. All of which gave extra poignancy to the question of what the new president would tell a troubled nation.

When Biden stepped to the microphones on the Capitol’s west steps shortly before noon, he used a tightly woven, 20-minute address to deliver three messages.

The first was that democracy has survived a severe blow. The second was that unity is possible. And the third was that the country will need that unity to weather a coronavirus storm that will continue to rage for a while longer.

Normally an incoming president, engaged in the peaceful transfer power, doesn’t have to say democracy remains intact. That should be inherent in the very exercise of inaugurating a new leader.

Yet for the first time since the Civil War, that reassurance was necessary. That’s because this transfer of power actually wasn’t peaceful. It was disrupted by violence while the counting of electoral-college votes was disrupted by violent attack.

In his remarks, Biden chose to portray that dark day both as a sign that democracy can be imperilled, and that it is sturdy enough to withstand such a blow. “Here we stand just days after a riotous mob thought they could use violence to silence the will of the people, to stop the work of our democracy, to drive us from this sacred ground,” he said. “It did not happen. It will never happen, not today, not tomorrow, not ever.”

Beyond survival, he called for something far more elusive: unity. In fact, it was more a plea than a call.

“To overcome these challenges, to restore the soul and secure the future of America requires so much more than words,” he said. “It requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy. Unity. Unity.” He specifically called for the political leaders surrounding him to “lower the temperature.”

Finally, he warned the nation that the coronavirus, which has stalked the land and hobbled the economy for 10 months, isn’t done doing its damage. The nation already has lost more to the pandemic than it did in all of World War II, he said, yet “we are entering what may be the toughest and deadliest period of the virus. We must set aside politics and finally face this pandemic as one nation, one nation.”

It’s just possible that Biden is well suited for this moment. Having endured over his life the loss of a wife, a daughter and a son, he wears empathy on his sleeve at a time when tragedy is playing out in thousands of American families. If Donald Trump was accused of not taking the virus seriously enough, Biden has, if anything, been accused of the opposite, which may be the right signal today.

Having spent more than four decades in the Senate and the White House, Biden has genuine friendships on which he can draw in a time of political blood feuds. His call to end divisive rhetoric and lower the national temperature, which was seen almost as an anachronistic throwback when he stressed it at the outset of his political campaign, now seems precisely the right message for the moment.

Yet Biden himself acknowledged that many consider calling for unity a “foolish fantasy” these days. Some Republicans are warning that if Biden allows his Democratic Party to proceed with a Senate impeachment trial of Trump in coming weeks, many in their party will view that as a sign the call for unity is empty.

Millions of Trump supporters don’t, at the moment, accept the legitimacy of Biden’s election. Ideological warfare between left and right is possible — and may already have begun as Republicans protested a series of executive orders Biden immediately issued to overturn Trump policies on his own authority.

All told, that storied Biden ability to persevere figures to be sorely tested.

The Wall Street Journal