Deft, moving — and cheesy: Joe Biden's inauguration speech. Credit: Patrick Semansky/Pool/AFP/Getty

There’s a set form to a US President’s inaugural address, and Joe Biden followed it. You place yourself in a historical tradition. You make free reference to Lincoln and Washington and Martin Luther King, and you quote as many as possible of a handful of resonant phrases from the history of American rhetoric: “we the people”, “better angels”, “more perfect union”, “one nation under God” and so on. Sleepy Joe managed all four of those, for instance, in very short order.
You say that you aim to unite the nation. You pay humble tribute to the voters and to the living presidents in the audience — in which respect, Donald Trump did Biden a favour by skipping the show. You say stirring things about the “American story” and the long tradition of the peaceful transfer of power. And above all you make the maneouvre that Lincoln pinched from Pericles for the Gettysburg Address: you say that you intend to honour the struggles and losses of the past by striving to create a better future.
You sprinkle the speech liberally with well-worn metaphors — crucibles and battles, cries for justice, storms and shadows, light and darkness, foundations shaken, chapters in history written, precious things hanging in balances, beacons beaconing to the world — and high-sounding epithets. Biden pulled “hallowed ground”, “sacred oath”, “soul”, “sacrifice”. “historic moment”, “dignity”, “humbled”, “eternal peace” and many more like them out of the presidential epithet generator. We might sneer, but cliché has its uses: it is reassuring to draw from a common stock of metaphor.
It’s not really possible to be too cheesy or too pious on such occasions (President Biden tested this proposition robustly), and it’s not really a great idea to depart from the script for the form of novelty. Especially not now. Biden’s job — amid a pandemic and with five people dead in a riot against the election result — was to play the reassuring mood music of an imperturbable flow of American history. This he did. The trick was to make it sound sincere.
Joe Biden doesn’t share Barack Obama’s lavish oratorical gifts, nor Donald Trump’s unpredictable and combustible energy. But he projected decency and sincerity, and he allowed the odd moment of folksy directness (“Look…” “I get you.” “Here’s the thing about life”) to cut through the flannel. And there was no mistaking his central message. The word “unity” and its cognates appeared more than a dozen times in the speech.
He used the bog-standard toolkit of the formal orator in the grand style. He piled on the anaphora (repeating phrases) and the tricolons (groups of three) and even whacked in the odd chiasmus, such as “we’ll lead not merely by the example of our power but the power of our example”, which would have been even niftier had he not said it before, and Bill Clinton said it before him.
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