Mike Donilon, a longtime Biden adviser who will join the West Wing, oversees the speech process. Jon Meacham, the historian and presidential biographer, also helps shape the inaugural address, delivered as the starting point of perhaps the most challenging presidency since Franklin Roosevelt.
The exact text is a well-kept secret, advisers told CNN. Not only because he wants the message to be fresh, but also because the speech has changed many times – out of necessity, given the horrific siege of the Capital on January 6, and also because of Biden’s penchant for rewriting speeches up to the last minute.
But several people close to Biden say clues to his address can be found in themes from his speech on November 7, 2020, when he begged Americans: “Let’s give each other a chance.”
“It’s time to put the harsh rhetoric away, lower the temperature, see each other again. Listen to each other again,” Biden said on that sharp night. “And to make progress, we must stop treating our opponents as our enemies. They are not our enemies. They are Americans. They are Americans.”
“Despite everything that has happened, despite everything the country has endured, his message has never deviated from the recovery of the country’s soul,” a top adviser to Biden told CNN. “This is his mission statement as much as ever.”
Jon Favreau, the former speechwriter of President Barack Obama, said Biden’s task with his speech “will be easier because of who he is and who he follows.”
“We are in the midst of a national trauma that has tested our faith in everything we have ever believed in this country, and the man who helped us through it has exacerbated the crisis indefinitely,” Favreau told CNN. “No inaugural address, even if well written or delivered, can heal the collective wound. But Joe Biden is someone who is held to his faith and optimism, despite enduring more tragedy than most, which has positioned him uniquely. to ask the country for the same. “
Favreau, who worked with Obama to design both of their inaugural speeches, said Biden’s speech was not the place to present a detailed policy agenda. The message, he said, would come during Biden’s first speech at a joint session of Congress in February.
“I would use the inauguration to raise people’s spirits,” Favreau said, “and remind them why the American experiment is worth saving.”
Biden assistants were reluctant to provide the details of Biden’s inaugural address. Ron Klain, his incoming chief of staff, said in a video interview with The Washington Post last week that Biden “takes time every few days to sit down and think about it and write thoughts and rewrite some thoughts. . ”
During a fundraiser Friday night, Biden said he was on his way to “what could be the most unusual inauguration in American history.”
“Perhaps not the most important, but the most unusual,” he said.
Biden told supporters that while his inauguration due to the coronavirus pandemic would not look like previous inaugurations, it would be an event the American people would be proud of. ‘
When Biden looks at the cameras shortly after noon on Wednesday, he will address a country through several crises that overlap. Nearly 4,000 Americans die every day from the coronavirus and many more are out of work, hungry and at risk of losing their homes.
In his first inauguration, Roosevelt delivered one of his most famous rules, telling Americans that “the only thing we need to fear is fear itself.” But the speech was also deeply political. Roosevelt called on Congress to give him “broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were invaded by a foreign enemy.”
Biden was cautious in his conversation about executive power, but in his remarks last week outlining the Covid-19 aid package that will be his first legislative effort to stem the ongoing disaster, he also called on partisans to set aside and unite sharpest tools. amidst existential threats.
His challenge Wednesday, Zelizer said, was not to persuade lawmakers or sweep votes, but to restore Americans’ confidence that he and the government he will lead understand their suffering.
“I do not think he will necessarily inspire through the high rhetoric that FDR could achieve, or even other presidents like Reagan or Lyndon Johnson or Kennedy,” Zelizer said. “He will inspire by just giving people the feeling that the adult is finally in the room, and an adult who cares about what we all go through as a country. He can deliver it, but it’s going to be difficult.”