WHAT UNITY MIGHT LOOK LIKE

The reported theme for President-elect Joe Biden’s inaugural address Wednesday is unity. Just how he’ll define the term and what measures he’ll suggest to achieve it remain to be seen.

However, around the country, partisans supporting him and officials expected to be part of his administration have been talking about plans that suggest the opposite of unity. Indeed, most of his own words speak more of partisanship and division than bringing people together.

It’s not the ideal that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday is commemorated on the day we write these words, had in mind.

The late civil rights leader, who died 52 years ago this April, would be gratified to see how far we’ve come but saddened that more progress hasn’t been made in some areas.

“The ultimate measure of a man,” said King during a 1964 news conference, “is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

Unity is easy to call for but harder to achieve, and harder still if the words you and your cronies use during times of challenge and controversy are divisive.

› Unity would be for Biden to begin his inaugural address by thanking President Donald Trump for Operation Warp Speed, which helped speed the creation of vaccines that are already at work trying to eliminate the global coronavirus pandemic. It also would be cathartic for Biden to apologize for his and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris’s earlier disparaging remarks about the vaccine (a main reason many are skeptical about it), but we won’t hold our breath for that one.

› Unity would be for Biden to call for a power-sharing agreement in the 50-50 U.S. Senate as Republicans did under President George W. Bush in 2001 when the Senate was last split evenly between Republicans and Democrats (and independents who vote with Democrats).

› Unity would be for Biden to apologize for the way President Trump’s Cabinet nominees and other appointments were treated by Democrats in the Senate solely for partisan reasons, and to ask that Republicans not do the same with his. (He might be surprised at how effective such words might be, not just with Republicans but with fair-minded Americans.)

› Unity would be for Biden to suggest that a special counsel be appointed to investigate his family’s financial dealings with China, Ukraine and elsewhere to prove where there is lots of smoke there is no fire.

› Unity would be for Biden to declare that Congress should take up no other issue but vaccine distribution until a coordinated, safe and equitable plan is put into place.

› Unity would be for Biden to declare that the Senate filibuster should remain in place just as it was for the 36 years he was in the Senate, all but a few of which were under Democratic leadership. He should say that if civil rights legislation and Medicare and tax cuts all could get passed under Senate Democratic majorities, his agenda can too.

› Unity would be for Biden to come down hard on social media companies whose censorious policies have harmed the political process. He should say that if Democratic principles can’t win in the arena of ideas, instead of social media squelching the ideas of Republicans (74 million of which voted for the other guy), they aren’t worth promulgating.

› Unity would be for Biden to suggest that a bipartisan commission look into the myriad problems in the 2020 presidential election. He should admit to the amount of voter fraud that was found (though it wasn’t enough to change the outcome), to the suggestion of fraud when states changes their voting rules at the last minute, and to the pain of those who believe the entire election process was fouled.

› Unity would be for Biden to suggest that while his administration will go different ways in many areas from the Trump administration, it will attempt to 1) build on Trump’s success in the Middle East in helping eradicate the Islamic State and in forging peace agreements between Israel and other countries, and 2) in continuing to expose the unbalanced, unfair U.S. trade relationship with China.

› Unity would be for Biden to suggest that with teachers eligible for the coronavirus vaccine in parts of the country, and with studies such as a recent one in North Carolina that show there is an “extremely limited” rate of virus transmission in school districts and no transmission from children to adults, that in-person education is vital. Numerous studies have shown that remote learning has been far less effective.

We’re of no illusion the incoming president is going to adopt the above list, but if he truly wants to foster a national sense of unity he’ll consider some of them. If he does not, an electorate that voted for him not because of who he was but because of who he wasn’t will turn on him. And he’ll suffer the same fate as the last Democratic president, who saw his much larger House majority vanish in a poof after only two years.