In truth, Biden’s speech was a standard inaugural. But it was also a huge relief

The new President of the United States was not even there at the most important moment of his inauguration. After the ceremony and after the speech, it is traditional for the new President to bid goodbye to the outgoing President on the steps of the Capitol. In the absence of Donald Trump, sulking in Florida, the Vice-President, Mike Pence and his wife Karen, shared a joke with Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff before the Pences joined their motorcade for the last time. They waved as they left and the Harrises waved back.  

It was a touching and historic moment for two reasons. The first is that Ms Harris is the first woman to hold the office of Vice-President and the first woman from either an Afro-Caribbean or an Indian background. In a nation whose original sin was slavery and which is still riven by racial injustice, as President Biden said in his inaugural address, this is a big moment. It has taken too long for America to achieve something as elementary as a woman in high office and so celebration is in order.  

But the second reason counts too. A moment of civility, a joke shared between political opponents, should be a matter of course but in a divided America it seemed like a throwback to a lost time. That unity was the main theme of the new President’s speech which is again a return to an established tradition. President Biden repeatedly quoted Abraham Lincoln and there were echoes of Jefferson, Clinton and Obama who have all given essentially the same speech on this occasion, in this setting on Capitol Hill. The standard inaugural speech is a plea for healing after a bruising election.  

This was, in truth, a standard inaugural. The extraordinary Presidency of Donald Trump and the riots in Washington DC that he incited gave the occasion some grandeur. And though President Biden invoked the Bible and referred obliquely to the personal tragedies that have afflicted his life – the loss of a wife and a daughter in a car crash and a son to cancer – the main appeal was to come together. It was the case for democracy and it is astonishing in a way that such a standard speech should have been greeted with such relief. It is a good day in American politics when Lady Ga Ga is on Capitol Hill but President Ga Ga is no longer in the White House.