#Why Biden may truly mean it when he vows to end our divisions

No politician in US history has shown the consistency and discipline displayed over the past 22 months by the once profoundly undisciplined Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. His inaugural address was a reiteration of the very same themes with which he began his run for the presidency in April 2019.

We were, he said then, “in a fight for the soul of America,” and he urged the country to choose “hope over fear, unity over division and, most importantly, truth over lies.” He repeated words like these throughout his quest for the Democratic nomination and then through the election season.

And then, in his first speech as president, here was Biden: “My whole soul is in this, bringing America together, uniting our people, uniting our nation. And I ask every American to join me in this cause. . . . Politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire, destroying everything in its path. Every disagreement doesn’t have to be a cause for total war. And we must reject the culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured.”

You are free to consider this mere blather, meaningless drivel, sadly naive. You can also consider it unexpectedly inspiring, surprisingly beautiful, ineffably wise.

Biden — whose two failed runs for president in 1988 and 2008 were solely about the drive and ambition of a blabbermouth career senator from Delaware and went nowhere as a result — won the presidency in 2020 because he found and dug in on a subject more serious than his résumé: a mission larger than his wants.

It wasn’t just that he wasn’t Donald Trump, though not being the incumbent is always the key to the success of a candidate who ousts a one-term president. And it wasn’t just that he pointedly separated himself from his woke Democratic rivals, whose urge to be lefter-than-thou made them seem fiscally deranged and culturally bonkers.

Biden looked for a sweet spot, and he found it. The sweet spot was “America is better than this.”

His argument was that Trump had become the voice of an attitude toward the United States that, for the first time in our history, didn’t seek to appeal to “the better angels of our nature” (Abraham Lincoln’s phrase).

In Biden’s view, Trump didn’t just accept that America was divided. His foe encouraged the division and sought to deepen it for his own naked political advantage.

Biden’s view resonated exactly where he needed it to resonate — among suburban swing voters whose very late break to Trump in 2016 in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin changed those states from blue to red and handed Trump the presidency.

Then those voters turned on the GOP in 2018 in sufficient numbers to flip 40 seats in the House to the Democrats in the largest midterm vote tally America had ever seen.

Trump had created a countermovement of force and power from the moment of his election that generated money and determined negative enthusiasm on an unprecedented scale. But they weren’t the telling factors in 2018 — or 2020, for that matter.

What Biden understood in a way no other Democrat really did was that while the voters who loved Trump’s divisiveness continued to love it, there was buyer’s remorse among those who had voted for him in spite of it.

He not only promised to be different in word, he was different in deed. A man legendary for not being able to shut up, shut up. He spoke only when necessary. He took advantage of the isolation required by the pandemic to keep himself contained and to allow the political conversation in the country to revolve almost entirely around Trump.

And when he did speak, he spoke quietly, a little haltingly and with a gentleness that was almost entirely new to him. The gentleness was, I’m pretty sure, an act. But what an act.

Most impressive was just how determined he was to play the long game. At this point, one can look at it and say maybe it really isn’t a game. Maybe this message is really his message. Maybe he does think he can do something to bridge the national divisions, that he can quiet the political wars.

It may seem like a sucker’s bet, but give our new president credit: He has played his hand brilliantly so far.

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