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Biden’s speech Thursday — from the spot where Donald Trump’s mob defiled the US tradition of peaceful transfers of power a year ago — was easily his most authoritative moment as President. He redefined himself against the extremism of the ex-President after struggling to project control during brutal months when a resurgent pandemic and chaos in his own party withered away any sense that he was commanding the political stage.
In generations to come, his address may be viewed either as the rallying call that saved the American experiment or as a pained eulogy for the democracy that his predecessor and would-be successor seems determined to destroy.
“We must decide: What kind of nation are we going to be?” Biden said, beseeching his compatriots to fight for their democracy as a “great nation” should. “Are we going to be a nation that accepts political violence as a norm? Are we going to be a nation where we allow partisan election officials to overturn the legally expressed will of the people? Are we going to be a nation that lives not by the light of the truth, but in the shadow of lies?”
“We cannot allow ourselves to be that kind of nation. The way forward is to recognize the truth and to live by it,” the President said.
It’s a lofty comparison, but Biden’s speech sought to accomplish a task similar to President Abraham Lincoln’s much shorter Gettysburg Address. The 16th President urged his nation in 1863 to rededicate itself, at a time when democracy was under existential threat, to the “unfinished work” of preserving government “of the people, for the people, by the people.” At the beginning of 2022, Biden — who noted he was speaking from National Statuary Hall, where Lincoln sat at desk 191 when the space hosted the House of Representatives — defined that same national quest as saving “the right to vote, the right to govern ourselves, the right to determine our own destiny.”
A strategy shift and a collision course with Trump
Biden’s speech also represented a…
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Source : cnn
