Biden’s opportunity

Idisagree with Joe Biden’s politics as much as anyone disagreed with Donald Trump’s. Unlike so many Trump opponents, however, I don’t hate President Biden.

On the contrary, I agree with a lot of what he said in his inaugural address.

When he said, “hear me clearly, disagreement must not lead to disunion,” that’s prudent advice with which I concur, but legions of Trump-haters over the last four years didn’t.

“We can treat each other with dignity and respect,” he said, imploring that we “stop the shouting and lower the temperature.” Good words, which unfortunately may fall on deaf ears to millions of Trump voters, who remember the superheated shrieking of Democrats at the 2017 inauguration that promised to not stop until Trump was impeached and cast out.

“Without unity, there is no peace, only bitterness and fury,” he said, “no progress, only exhausting outrage.” Those are indeed the predictable outcomes when incessant disunion, denial and delegitimizing propaganda were launched like missiles against the president in 2016 who, incidentally, had an Electoral College margin of victory larger than Joe Biden’s.

“Show respect to one another,” he urged. “Politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire destroying everything in its path.” I’m right with Biden there, and what a difference it might have made had those sentiments prevailed with not-my-president/Never Trumpers who never respected his election, were insultingly disrespectful of him personally and promised scorched-earth opposition to his policies.

As he said in his speech on Wednesday, “We have to be better than this,” and he’s right. That’s why I was disappointed that Biden broke with the time-honored tradition of thanking his predecessor for his service. The snub may have been in response to Trump’s bad decision to break the 152-year-old tradition of attending his successor’s inauguration, but I wish he had been better than that. The classy thing would have been to adhere to the “two wrongs” adage.

The point of drawing the contrast between what Joe Biden inspiringly said and what’s been discouragingly done since 2017 isn’t to call for retribution, but to bring balance to the task at hand.

There’s little doubt that restoring the good-faith unity Biden wants now would be good for our nation, but it’s going to be a tough sell without first walking back the bad-faith disunity of the past four years.

The inaugural speech wasn’t the time for doing so, of course. Inaugurations are forward-looking occasions, and it was welcoming to hear President Biden reach out to those who didn’t support him, and “take a measure of me and my heart.”

In his heart, he knows how Trump was maligned and vilified, with unprecedented hyperbole and hypocrisy, and he knows that millions of Americans also know it. The hope is that President Biden can rein in the vindictive radicals in his party, and find constructive ways to repudiate their behavior as something that should never happen again. Calling that shameful spade by its rightful name would go a long way toward bridging the partisan divide.

It was lamentable to see the event that celebrates our uniquely American peaceful transfer of power shrouded by an over-show of armed troops. Thousands of machine guns clash with and undermine the imagery of a president of the people.

Biden’s inaugural speech also omitted any reference to the prescience of another president, our own Bill Clinton, who in his 1997 inaugural address acknowledged aloud the stark political fissures of the time.

Noting that the people had chosen a president of one party and a Congress of the other, Clinton said, “Surely they did not do this to advance the politics of petty bickering and extreme partisanship they plainly deplore.” Clinton then quoted Cardinal Bernardin on the wrongness of wasting precious time “on acrimony and division.”

After the swearing-in pageantry all cloaked with its rahrah rhetoric of unity in the abstract sense, however, Biden’s busy first day included issuing more than a dozen executive orders — some involving subjects where there is acrimonious disunity — as if he had received a mandate. Democrats edged to a tie in the closest of races in the Senate, and lost ground in the House.

Unfortunately, his initial actions and promises are more polarizing, not less. Vowing to roll back relatively inconsequential abortion restrictions, like the Mexico City policy that banned U.S. funding of overseas abortions? He could hardly pick a more inflammatory topic less worthy of “immediate” relief or attention. Better to apply the 10-foot-pole rule to anything abortion-related early on.

If the goal is to unify people, why not start with truly common-ground issues? The scourge of crime is most felt by the nation’s poorest neighborhoods and residents; building on Trump’s track record of reduced criminal violence would be universally popular.

Likewise with continuing to study and seek remedies for the national travesty of high-cost urban public schools that fail to teach throngs of students. Everybody wants better education.

Likely a one-term president, due to age, Biden has a real opportunity to lead on bipartisan overtures necessary to restore a greater degree of unity.

It would be a worthy legacy, if he can do it.