Inaugural address: Biden crafts speech to unify a country in crisis

“It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric, lower the temperature, see each other again. Listen to each other again,” Biden said on that crisp night. “And to make progress, we have to stop treating our opponents as our enemies. They are not our enemies. They are Americans. They’re Americans.”

“Despite all that’s happened, despite all that the country has endured, his message never strayed from restoring the soul of the nation,” a top Biden adviser told CNN. “That is his mission statement as much as ever.”

Jon Favreau, the former chief speechwriter for President Barack Obama, said Biden’s task with his speech “will be easier because of who he is and who he’s following.”

“We’re in the midst of a national trauma that’s tested our faith in everything good we’ve ever believed about this country, and the guy who was supposed to be helping us through it made the crisis infinitely worse,” Favreau told CNN. “No inaugural address, however well-written or delivered, can heal that collective wound. But Joe Biden is someone who’s held on to his faith and optimism despite enduring more tragedy than most, which makes him uniquely positioned to ask the country to do the same.”

Favreau, who worked with Obama to craft both inaugural addresses, said Biden’s speech was not the place to offer a detailed policy agenda. That message, he said, will come during Biden’s first address to a joint session of Congress in February.

“I’d use the inaugural to lift people’s spirits,” Favreau said, “and remind them why the American experiment is worth saving.”

Biden aides have been reluctant to preview specifics of Biden’s inaugural address. Ron Klain, his incoming chief of staff, told The Washington Post in a video interview last week that Biden “takes time every few days to sit down and think about it and write some thoughts and rewrite some thoughts.”

During a fundraiser Friday evening, Biden said he is heading into what “may be the most unusual inaugural in American history.”

“Maybe not the most consequential, but the most unusual,” he said.

Biden told supporters that while his inauguration, due to the coronavirus pandemic, would not look like previous inaugurations, it would be “an event that the American people will be proud of.”

When Biden looks into the cameras shortly after noon on Wednesday, he will be addressing a country in the throes of multiple overlapping crises. Nearly 4,000 Americans are dying every day from the coronavirus and many more are out of work, hungry and at risk of losing their homes.

Roosevelt in his first inaugural delivered one of his most famous lines, telling Americans that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” But the speech was also deeply political. Roosevelt called on the Congress to grant him “broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”

Biden has been cautious in his talk about executive authority, but in his remarks last week outlining the Covid-19 relief package that will be his first legislative effort to stem the ongoing disaster, he too called on partisans to set aside their sharpest tools and unite in the face of existential threats.

His challenge on Wednesday, Zelizer said, was not in convincing legislators or whipping votes, but in restoring Americans’ confidence that he and the government he will lead understands their suffering.

“I don’t think he’ll necessarily inspire through kind of the high rhetoric that FDR was able to achieve, or even some other presidents like Reagan or Lyndon Johnson or Kennedy,” Zelizer said. “He’ll inspire by just giving people a sense that the adult is finally in the room, and an adult who cares about what we’re all going through as a country. He can deliver that, but it’s going to be tough.”