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“Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States on Wednesday.” AP News
Watch Biden’s inaugural address. C-Span
The right is skeptical of Biden’s call for unity but hopeful that he will make an effort to reach out to Republicans.
“On substance, Biden is not going to pursue a consensus, bipartisan agenda, but a progressive one. That is his right. He’s a Democrat who has always been in the center of gravity of his party, which has steadily moved left over the decades. He’s not going to act on the more extravagant demands of the left of his party—ending the filibuster, adding new states—both as a matter of temperament and because he lacks the votes in the Senate to do it. But almost everything he does unilaterally or pushes legislatively will inherently be anathema to the GOP…
“All that said, President Biden can do his part to lower the temperature of our politics, and raise the tone, simply by not stirring the pot every day the way Donald Trump did and by honoring the norms his predecessor cast aside. This won’t be transformative, but there actually might [be] some unity around the proposition that it will be a welcome change.”
Rich Lowry, Politico
“My first reaction: what a relief to have a president who talks like a normal human being. I didn’t vote for the guy, but I’m grateful to hear a presidential speech that doesn’t make me mad — mad, either because I’m angry at the president for what he said or how he said it, or mad with the president at the people or thing he was attacking…
“The TV people covering it were startlingly enthusiastic about all of this. I say ‘startlingly’ because I didn’t expect that they would allow their feelings to show quite like this. But they did. This rubbed me the wrong way, not because I’m shocked to discover that journalists are liberal, but because it made me think that this is how press coverage of the Biden administration is likely to be, at least at the beginning: fawning and filled with relief that Orange Man Bad is gone.”
Rod Dreher, American Conservative
“Within seconds of its conclusion, Biden's speech was being hailed as a masterpiece. Even the normally level-headed Chris Wallace of Fox News called it the best inaugural address he had ever heard. I somehow doubt this. Biden's remarks were an indifferently delivered hodgepodge of decontextualized Lincoln quotes, Hallmark wisdom, and jargon…
“This is not an indictment of Biden or his speechwriters, but of the audience to which the remarks were directed. To compare what we heard on Wednesday with Kennedy's inauguration speech (‘Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country’) is either dishonest or idiotic… The best adjective for describing his speech was ‘normal,’ both in the sense that it was neither an abject failure nor a masterpiece of rhetoric and, more important, because it was delivered in accordance with all the norms upon which we have come to expect.”
Matthew Walther, The Week
“According to Biden, we are a ‘great nation’ and a ‘good people.’ But we also oppress minorities with an ever-rising fervor. ‘Growing inequity’ is among the greatest challenges facing the country, according to Biden, along with the ‘sting of systemic racism’ and encroaching ‘white supremacy.’ Only now are we confronting ‘a cry for racial justice, some four hundred years in the making.’…
“One might have thought that more than 50 years of civil rights legislation; the banishing of Jim Crow segregation; the ubiquity of racial preferences throughout corporate America, higher education, and government; trillions of dollars of tax dollars attempting to close the academic achievement gap; and the election of black politicians by white voting districts would have reduced inequity, not increased it. But to Biden’s speechwriters, steeped in academic victimology, racial inequity is always with us, requiring constant remediation from government.”
Heather Mac Donald, City Journal
“Mr. Biden is right that there is a difference between ‘truth’ and ‘lies,’ and too much political discourse is strewn with falsehoods. But that fault rests with partisans on all sides. Most political differences aren’t between truth and lies. They are debates about the tradeoffs between core principles like freedom and equality, or over the best means to achieve good ends…
“We heard too little in Mr. Biden’s speech to reassure conservatives now being purged and ostracized that he will call off the emboldened progressive censors. If his pursuit of social justice becomes a drive to blame every inequity in American life on racism, he will divide more than unite. If he insists that those who disagree on climate change are ‘deniers’ who care nothing for the planet, he will alienate millions… The test of Mr. Biden’s unity pledge will be in how he governs. We’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, which is what every new American President deserves.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
The left praises Biden’s speech but cautions that compromise requires good faith efforts on both sides.
The left praises Biden’s speech but cautions that compromise requires good faith efforts on both sides.
“Of course, the incendiary vulgarity of the past four years set the bar so low that anything more than a monster truck exhibition might have seemed artful. But the polished oratory interspersed with performances — Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez and Garth Brooks delivering rousing versions of patriotic songs and religious hymns — elevated the proceedings, in just the right way. For a president who vows to raise the level of political discourse in the nation, it all came across as tone-perfect.”
Peter Marks, Washington Post
“Biden did not shrink from the unpleasant facts of the moment; he embraced them. ‘We must reject the culture,’ he said, ‘in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured.’ He did not say Trump’s name; he did not need to. The contrast was all there. Unlike his predecessor, Biden began his tenure by levelling with the American people…
“He spoke of a ‘winter of peril,’ as well as one of ‘significant possibilities,’ that awaits America, and bluntly said what Trump never could: that as many Americans have now died in the pandemic as in all of the Second World War, and that we must mourn them. He spoke of the threat of ‘white supremacy’—surely a first in an Inaugural Address—and also pledged to vanquish this new ‘domestic terrorism.’ He spoke of jobs lost and racial injustice. This, after the past four years, is something new and important in and of itself—a strategy of truth-telling, not truth-denying. The road to reconciliation, if there is such a road, must run through it.”
Susan B. Glasser, New Yorker
“Biden’s unity project has to begin with a demand he makes of the Republican Party: They have to accept the legitimacy of his victory, period. That’s the first step toward unity. Anyone who continues pandering to the deranged elements of their base with bogus conspiracy theories about fraud should simply be disqualified from any role in the coming policy debates. If Sen. Josh Hawley has something to say about Biden’s tax plan, the only response should be, ‘When Hawley acknowledges that Biden is the legitimate president, then we’ll consider what he thinks about the capital gains tax. But not before.’…
“Unity sometimes means excluding those who won’t agree to respect basic ground rules. You wouldn’t play basketball with someone who throws the ball over the fence as soon as the other team makes a basket; the game won’t work unless you tell him that if he does that, he won’t be allowed to play… If you don’t agree to the rules, you don’t get to participate.”
Paul Waldman, Washington Post
“[Biden] launched his primary campaign by declaring that Donald Trump’s presidency was the first time in U.S. history that our nation had ‘walked away from’ its egalitarian ideals. He insisted that Americans ‘can’t forget what happened in Charlottesville,’ even as he invited them to forget the disenfranchisement of free Black men in the 1820s, the collapse of Reconstruction a half-century later, the unraveling of shared prosperity in the 1970s, and every other time the moral arc of the American republic had bent toward injustice. Against the darkness of Trump’s reign, Biden offered the blinding light of patriotic amnesia. Against the sweeping reform programs of his primary rivals, he presented poll-tested half-measures as badges of electability…
“And yet: He also assembled a platform more progressive than any in the Democratic Party’s modern history. And his policy commitments only grew more sweeping as the COVID pandemic grew more devastating. By November, Biden was at once the candidate of a ‘return to normalcy’ and that of a multitrillion-dollar green-energy transition. He was a candidate who insisted that America’s sitting president — whom roughly 40 percent of the public revered — was an embodiment of every value that the nation must reject and that America’s divisions weren’t as deep as they appeared. Biden’s inaugural was riddled with such contradictions. But it also put them to productive use.”
Eric Levitz, New York Magazine
“Biden’s challenge continues to be that his two main promises — to restore traditions and comity after Donald Trump’s divisiveness and lawlessness, and to try to enact an aggressive liberal policy agenda — don’t fit naturally together. His inaugural address met that conflict head on…
“Biden was inviting everyone, including Trump supporters, to unite in rejecting Trumpism, without insisting that unity required agreement with Democrats on specific policy questions. At the same time, he essentially invoked Trump’s mob to give himself and the slim Democratic majorities in Congress license to work towards their policy goals, no matter how controversial, without violating the underlying unity… I doubt that Biden’s speech will go down in history as one of the greatest, but it was solid and well delivered.”
Jonathan Bernstein, Bloomberg
