Mike Donilon, a longtime Biden adviser who will join him in the West Wing, is overseeing the speech writing process. Jon Meacham, the presidential historian and biographer, is also helping to shape the inaugural speech, which will be made as perhaps the most challenging opening mark of the presidency since Franklin Roosevelt.
The exact wording 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 several times – out of necessity, given the terrible encirclement of the Capitol on January 6, and also because of Biden’s tendency to rewrite speeches until the last minute.
But several people close to Biden say clues to his speech can be found in themes of his speech on November 7, 2020, when he pleaded with Americans: “Let’s give each other a chance.”
“It’s time to put aside the harsh rhetoric, drop the temperature, see each other again. Listen to each other again,” said Biden that cold night. “And to make progress, we have to 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, its message has never strayed from restoring the nation’s soul,” a senior Biden adviser told CNN. “This is your mission statement, as much as ever.”
Jon Favreau, the former chief speechwriter for President Barack Obama, said Biden’s task with his speech “will be easier because of who he is and who he is following”.
“We are in the midst of a national trauma that tested our faith in all the good that we already believe about this country, and the guy who should be helping us has made the crisis infinitely worse,” Favreau told CNN. “No inaugural speech, however well written or delivered, can heal this collective wound. But Joe Biden is someone who has maintained his faith and optimism, despite enduring more tragedies than most, which makes him in a unique position to ask to the country to do the same. “
Favreau, who worked with Obama to draft the two inaugural speeches, said Biden’s speech is not the place to offer a detailed political agenda. That message, he said, will come during Biden’s first speech at a joint Congressional session in February.
“I would use the inaugural to lift people’s spirits,” said Favreau, “and remind them of why the American experiment is worth saving.”
Biden’s advisers are reluctant to predict details of Biden’s inaugural speech. Ron Klain, his new chief of staff, told The Washington Post in a video interview last week that Biden “takes some time every few days to sit down and think about it and write some thoughts and rewrite some thoughts.”
During a fundraiser on Friday night, Biden said he was entering what “may be the most unusual opening in American history”.
“Perhaps not the most important, but the most unusual,” he said.
Biden told supporters that although his possession, due to the coronavirus pandemic, does not look like the previous ones, it would be “an event that the American people will be proud of”.
When Biden looks at the cameras just after noon on Wednesday, he will be heading to a country in the midst of several overlapping crises. Almost 4,000 Americans die every day from coronavirus and many more are out of work, hungry and at risk of losing their homes.
Roosevelt, in his first inauguration, uttered one of his most famous lines, telling Americans that “the only thing we must fear is fear itself”. But the speech was also deeply political. Roosevelt asked Congress to grant him “broad executive power to wage war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were indeed invaded by a foreign enemy”.
Biden has been cautious in his speech on executive authority, but in his comments last week outlining the Covid-19 aid package, which will be his first legislative effort to stem the ongoing disaster, he also called on supporters to put aside their sharper tools and come together in the face of existential threats.
His challenge on Wednesday, said Zelizer, was not to convince lawmakers or win votes, but to restore Americans’ confidence that he and the government he will lead understand his suffering.
“I don’t think it will necessarily inspire through the rhetoric that FDR was able to achieve, or even from some other presidents like Reagan or Lyndon Johnson or Kennedy,” said Zelizer. “He will inspire just by giving people the feeling that the adult is finally in the room, and an adult who cares about what we are all going through as a country. He can deliver that, but it will be difficult.”