The Hardest Inaugural Address in Generations
If Joe Biden finds himself at a loss for words as he prepares his inaugural address, who can blame him? Finding the words to begin his presidency is a challenge as great as any chief executive has ever faced.
There have been bleaker and more uncertain moments in American history. Abraham Lincoln came to Washington in 1861 already shadowed by the threat of assassination and spoke to a nation from which seven states had already seceded. In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt spoke as a quarter of the workforce was idle, with a banking system near total collapse. Richard Nixon took power in 1969 when a purposeless quagmire of a war was taking 500 American lives a week overseas, and violence at home was scarring city streets and pastoral college campuses.
Still, what Biden must address is something uniquely daunting. The inaugural is a tradition nearly as old as the Republic itself, a celebration of the stable continuity of power that has validated the American Experiment for more than two centuries. Whatever the external threat and internal unrest—a civil war, the Great Depression, violence in the streets, a financial meltdown—the moment has always been a chance to remind Americans of that underlying agreement.
Today that agreement is, suddenly, no longer a shared value. An untold number of Americans, including the sitting president and more than 150 members of Congress, have clearly said they would sacrifice it just to win.
From the moment it begins, the inaugural will clearly communicate that something is wrong, and not just because everyone will be wearing face masks. The assault on the Capitol on January 6 has stripped the event of any sense of celebration, a celebration already truncated by the shadow of the coronavirus. There will be no crowds on the National Mall. No parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, with the new president and his family stepping from the limousine to wave to the crowds. The only presence on the street will be armed soldiers, a chilling reminder that the stage from which President Joe Biden will speak was overrun by a mob that came perilously close to mass murder. The core purpose of the inaugural itself—the “peaceful transfer of power” that is cited at the start of almost every president’s first speech—was not just ignored, but directly attacked by Donald Trump’s monthslong campaign to delegitimize the election, and supported by a considerable number of congressional members who will watch him deliver the speech (among them Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, whose hunger to be at the podium in four years led them to challenge the clearly valid electoral votes of Arizona and Pennsylvania).
Reports say Biden is likely to emphasize “unity” in the address, much as he did in his campaign. In delivering that message, Biden can no longer rely on the once-obvious truth that Americans all cherish the smooth working of democracy. Instead, he must argue to save it. That campaign to impugn the election, and the assault on the Capitol that nearly saw elected officials seized or killed on the floor of the Congress, defines a key part of what Biden must say and not say. It starts with the question of how to talk about Trump himself: Every president since Jimmy Carter has thanked his predecessor (even if that predecessor was his opponent) for their years of service and their help in easing the transfer of power, (Yes, even Trump thanked both Obamas “for their gracious aid throughout this transition.”) But Trump himself is skipping the inauguration, reportedly in favor of a military ceremony to himself. And after Trump’s conduct over these weeks and months, there are no conceivable words that Biden could offer Trump other than Cromwell’s to Parliament in 1653: “In the name of God, go!”
But Biden must say a lot more about these past months. He needs to call out the campaign for what it was: an attempt to subvert the will of the electorate, with means as contemptible as the ultimate end.
That might seem like bitter medicine for a moment when we’re more accustomed to optimistic bromides. But there is precedent for tough opening words in a moment of crisis.
FDR’s 1933 inaugural is remembered primarily for one phrase: “The only thing we have to fear is ... fear itself.” But he also was blunt when he cited the cause of America’s woes. Without naming them precisely, he went after bankers and corporate giants. The nation was in trouble, he said, “primarily ... because the rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men ... They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers.”
In a similar vein, Biden needs to find the words that define the assault on the Capitol, and the assault on the election, as serious wounds that have left scars on the body politic—in language broad enough that it doesn’t feel like a political attack. He can “excuse” (in a sense) the doubts many Americans still have about the process, because those doubts were fed from the highest office in the land. He can avoid the charge of partisanship by praising the Republicans and conservatives in the courts and state governments who stayed true to their oaths, even as he notes that the courage of a single Capitol Hill cop, Eugene Goodman, likely saved the Senate chamber from turning into a killing ground.
He can also find a bridge from a justified indictment of what happened to what has to happen next. It’s often been said that the surest path to domestic unity is some external threat, whether Germany, or communism, or the 9/11 attacks. (Ronald Reagan thought the prospect of an alien invasion would unite the world.) The coronavirus pandemic has inflicted misery of every sort: physical, economic, spiritual. Biden has already embraced the Churchillian approach of describing present conditions in stark terms: that there are dark days ahead. His speech can argue that the real way to “heal” is by recognizing that the unique nature of the threat demands the boldest of policies that even traditional adversaries can embrace. (Consider that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has praised Biden’s $1.9 trillion recovery package).
If there’s one aspect of past addresses Biden should not follow, it is to reach for flowery, “poetic” rhetoric. John Kennedy and Ted Sorensen created a challenge for future presidents and speechwriters to aspire to a place in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, and it has not always gone well. Richard Nixon told us that “the American dream does not come to those who fall asleep.” Bill Clinton declared that: “from this joyful mountaintop of celebration, we hear a call to service in the valley.” Barack Obama, as gifted a writer as any president, said: “let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back, nor did we falter … ”
Enough. Right now Americans need to hear blunt, clear language, in the spirit of FDR’s assertion that “our primary purpose is to put people to work.” We are a country in which millions of the least well-off need to be able to put food on the table and stay in their homes; our cities and towns need the resources to get garbage off the street, keep our teachers in the classrooms, keep the cops and firefighters on the job. We do not need to hear Hallmark sentiments, or any more sentences that begin: “Let us … ” We need to hear the new president tell us he understands the fix we are in, and has a clear sense of how to get out of it.
The temptation for Biden, one that has lured many of his predecessors and may well lure him as well, is to reassure his fellow citizens by reminding us of other dark days—of Washington at Valley Forge, of Lincoln in the Civil War, of FDR and a depression and a Nazi menace—and to promise that we will prevail just as they did. The truth is that none of those was a moment the republic was guaranteed to survive. Each was a new threat that demanded a new kind of response, a challenge Americans had never risen to before.
Our democracy is in a moment like that now. America’s underlying mistrust is being fueled by the deadliest epidemic in our history, and to mount a sufficient response, we may need shock more than reassurance. That promise that we can once again prevail will be a lot more compelling if it follows as tough and direct an inaugural speech as we’ve ever heard.
