Inauguration Day: President Joe Biden addresses tough cures for the disease of disunity

President Joe Biden's inaugural address on Wednesday was not filled with soaring rhetoric about a gloriously unified America marching toward a better future. Instead, befitting the times, this was a tough-love speech in which the new commander in chief spoke harshly of how the country is riddled with problems and in desperate need of a cure.

It was an appeal for a return to the American norms trampled by his predecessor — truth, decency, respect — delivered in the most abnormal of circumstances.

The masked participants were a constant reminder of the coronavirus tragedy that has claimed more than 400,000 American lives in less than a year. The thousands of troops surrounding the U.S. Capitol were a reminder of the deadly rioting at the same site just two weeks earlier.

'A crucible for the ages'

Donald Trump slunk from the city before the swearing-in, ditching a more than 150-year old tradition of attending a successor's inauguration. And there would be no crowd-size comparisons this time: The National Mall was emptied of throngs out of concerns for both contagion and insurrection.

The beginnings of his presidency are "a crucible for the ages," said Biden, who, at 78, is the oldest person to assume the office. "Few people in our nation's history have been more challenged or found a time more challenging or difficult than the time we're in now."

Appropriately, Biden's speech was less about specific policy prescriptions than it was the clear-eyed pragmatism of a doctor diagnosing a treatable malignancy: the disease of disunity.

Failure to end the nation's "uncivil war," he warned, would result in never-ending bitterness, outrage and the potential for chaos. "Politics doesn't have to be a raging fire, destroying everything in its path."

'My whole soul is in this'

It stood in stark contrast to remarks Trump delivered four years earlier when he strangely spoke about "American carnage" that largely existed within his own mind. In fact, American carnage — much of it fomented by the 45th president himself — is what Biden inherited.

And where Trump made promises he couldn't, or wouldn't, keep, Biden issued a challenge. He called on Americans to strive for the commonality required to dress the nation's wounds: "I know speaking of unity can sound like some foolish fantasy these days. I know the forces that divide us are deep and they are real."

And how to achieve unity in a riven nation?

First and foremost, by delivering results that improve people's lives. As Barack Obama, whom Biden served for eight years as vice president, put it in his own first inaugural address, "The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works."

Biden, an old-style Democrat who first joined the Senate in 1973, and a team that includes Kamala Harris, the first female vice president, will be judged on their ability to harness the full power of the federal government to attack the pandemic and the economic pain it has created.

"My whole soul is in this," the 46th president said Wednesday.

Biden's words might be just the balm a shaken nation needs. And the new president, who has emerged from shattering personal grief with empathy rather than bitterness, might just well be the right man for the moment.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Inauguration Day: President Joe Biden takes on the disease of disunity