Yahoo Finance What Biden should say in his inaugural address
As Joe Biden prepares to be sworn in as our 46th president, the nation convulses with insurrection and disease. An outgoing, defeated president is doing everything he can to undermine our democracy while a pandemic rages uncontrolled throughout our land. It is amidst this acute national crisis that Joe Biden takes the oath of office.
Luckily for Biden, history provides some instruction on how to manage this moment — and how not to. From Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt, American presidents have assumed office in moments of national crisis before. Their inaugural addresses provide a helpful guide to how Biden, in his own speech, can successfully assert his own democratic legitimacy, boldly acknowledging the cause of our current ills while bringing a beleaguered and fractured nation together in hope and aspiration. Back in 1801, following a bitterly partisan campaign against defeated incumbent John Adams, Thomas Jefferson knew he needed to assert the legitimacy of his electoral victory. Proclaiming the importance of “absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority,” Jefferson called on the country to respect the validity of his win, a respect he felt was “the vital principle of republics.”
The need to unequivocally state his democratic mandate was similarly one Franklin Roosevelt, facing stiff opposition to his New Deal policies, felt in 1933. Voters, he said, “have registered a mandate that they want direct, vigorous action.” In doing so, he was reminding his opposition that his policies were the will of the majority which duly elected him to lead them out of the Great Depression.
Both Jefferson and Roosevelt understood the importance of underling to their opponents the legitimacy of their power derived from the democratic will of voters. For his part, Jefferson was at pains to state his “jealous care of the right of election by the people.” Roosevelt, too, proclaimed to the nation it was his fellow citizens who “have made me the present instrument of their wishes”.
Biden needs to remind the country — especially those who seek to undermine the legitimacy of his presidency — that he takes the oath with the support of 81 million Americans who voted for him. Despite what the outgoing president or his recalcitrant supporters contend, the 2020 election was free and fair. Its results are not in question. The American people have spoken, and the courts and the Congress have both affirmed what they said. Our democracy functioned, just as it did in 1800 and 1932. 
Our democracy also functioned in 1860, when Abraham Lincoln was first elected. Yet rather than emphasizing his own democratic mandate in the face of an opposition which viewed his election as illegitimate, Lincoln’s 1861 inaugural address was a desperate attempt to placate his opponents. While he did warn that secession would “divide and ruin” the South, much of his speech was dedicated to assuaging the fears of southern secessionists, who worried Lincoln would abolish slavery. “There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension,” he assured them, going on to state plainly that “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery.”
As Lincoln learned, however, there can be no unity without concession. Little more than a month after he delivered his inaugural speech, the opening volleys of the Civil War were fired, and the United States plunged into the bloodiest conflict in our history.
Still, Lincoln was not blind to the crisis at hand. “A disruption of the Federal Union, heretofore only menaced, is now formidably attempted.” Lincoln knew — and was not afraid to frankly acknowledge — just how precarious that moment in our nation’s history was. Nor was he afraid of acknowledging the root cause of the Civil War. In his 1865 inaugural address, Lincoln pointed out that “slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest” in the South and that “all knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.” Similarly, Joe Biden must not underplay the precarity of this moment, nor shrink away from identifying its root causes. That Trump and his fellow Republicans refused to accept the legitimacy of his defeat, facilitating the current crisis of confidence, is not up for debate. That he was grossly negligent in handling the pandemic, leading to hundreds of thousands of American deaths, is a matter of historical record. To shrink away from that, to ignore it or to minimize the gravity of this crisis and what has caused it, would be a serious mistake by the new president.
Luckily for Biden, history is again instructive. “Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment,” Roosevelt said in 1933, noting that “in every dark hour of our national life, a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.” Twelve years later, as the Second World War raged in Europe and Asia, Roosevelt again called on Americans to rise to the challenge, reminding them the war was “a test of our courage — of our resolve — of our wisdom — our essential democracy.”
Similarly, in his 1865 address, Lincoln acknowledged in unflinching terms just what was at stake in the waning days of the Civil War. “Both parties deprecated war,” he said, “but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish.” Recognizing that war was the only option for the survival of the Republic, Lincoln reminded the nation of what they were fighting for while imploring them to stay the course.
Facing not only a constitutional crisis but a pandemic which has killed 400,000 of our fellow citizens, Biden will need to call upon the American people not to shrink away from this dangerous moment. Rather, he should implore us to meet it with a firm and unshakable determination.
That does not mean Biden should be all doom and gloom. Far from it. The new president’s predecessors knew how important it was to strike a hopeful, optimistic tone, even amid our nation’s darkest and most precarious days. Perhaps most famously, Roosevelt reminded Americans in 1933 that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” And while — as Lincoln learned — optimism and a call for unity alone are not enough, they do matter.
Joe Biden needs to remind Americans that, as Thomas Jefferson said, “every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.” Despite a relative handful of insurrectionists storming our Capitol, most Americans still agree on the big questions. Democracy, liberty, the rule of law: these are principles which transcend political party.
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies,” Abraham Lincoln implored the nation in 1861. The 46th president would do well to directly quote the 16th president here, because the same is true in 2021. It is a theme Lincoln built on four years later, speaking these immortal words: “With malice toward none; with charity for all.”
Joe Biden should similarly remind the nation that only by going forward together hand-in-hand, not as Democrats and Republicans but as Americans, can we — as Lincoln so eloquently said — “bind up the nation’s wounds” and “achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”
