“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