Amid High Drama, Biden Declares Democracy Has Survived, Unity Possible - WSJ - 0 views
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Over the last five decades, Joe Biden endured multiple personal tragedies and saw his political obituary written over and over again—yet always found a way to pick up the pieces and move forward.
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Mr. Biden was sworn in amid extraordinary circumstances: an ongoing pandemic, the glaring absence of an outgoing president who refused to accept the legitimacy of last year’s election, the scars of a mob attack designed to prevent him from taking office still visible on the Capitol just behind him, the nation’s first woman and first minority vice president at his side.
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The first was that democracy has survived a severe blow. The second was that unity is possible. And the third was that the country will need that unity to weather a coronavirus storm that will continue to rage for a while longer.
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Yet for the first time since the Civil War, that reassurance was necessary. That’s because this transfer of power actually wasn’t peaceful. It was disrupted by violence while the counting of electoral-college votes was disrupted by violent attack.
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“To overcome these challenges, to restore the soul and secure the future of America requires so much more than words,” he said. “It requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy. Unity. Unity.” He specifically called for the political leaders surrounding him to “lower the temperature.”
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Finally, he warned the nation that the coronavirus, which has stalked the land and hobbled the economy for 10 months, isn’t done doing its damage. The nation already has lost more to the pandemic than it did in all of World War II, he said, yet “we are entering what may be the toughest and deadliest period of the virus. We must set aside politics and finally face this pandemic as one nation, one nation.”
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Having spent more than four decades in the Senate and the White House, Mr. Biden has genuine friendships on which he can draw in a time of political blood feuds. His call to end divisive rhetoric and lower the national temperature, which was seen almost as an anachronistic throwback when he stressed it at the outset of his political campaign, now seems precisely the right message for the moment.
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Millions of Trump supporters don’t, at the moment, accept the legitimacy of Mr. Biden’s election. Ideological warfare between left and right is possible—and may already have begun as Republicans protested a series of executive orders Mr. Biden immediately issued to overturn Trump policies on his own authority.