President Joseph R. Biden has the opportunity to lead!

Inauguration speech by President Joseph R. Biden

Although, in this opinion echo, the writer disagrees with President Joe Biden's politics , the author actually agrees with a lot of what he said in his historic inaugural address. https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2021/jan/22/bidens-opportunity/

An echo opinion published in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette by Dana Kelly. 

President Biden's opportunity

When President Biden said, "hear me clearly, disagreement must not lead to disunion," that's prudent advice with which I concur.

"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 the Trumpzi voters, who remember the superheated shrieking of Democrats at the 2017, inauguration that promised to not stop until Trump was impeached and cast out. (Maine Writer opinion- Donald Trump lied, cheated and colluded with Russia during his Trumpzi campaign to win the electoral college margin and defeat Secretary Hillary Clinton.....big reason for having him impeached!)

"Without unity, there is no peace, only bitterness and fury," Biden 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 at Wednesday's inauguration, "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 President 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 rah-rah rhetoric of unity in the abstract sense, however, Biden's busy first day included issuing more than a dozen important executive orders.

"Are you ready to work?"- President Joseph Biden!

President Joseph Biden said, "the American story depends. not on any one of us, not on some of us, but on all of us."