This is an adapted excerpt from MSNBC’s special coverage of President Joe Biden’s address to the nation on Wednesday.
President Joe Biden’s address on Wednesday will go down in history. Not just as a great Biden speech, but as a great moment in the American presidency.
It was a timeless speech about a very specific moment. Biden talked about the situation he inherited from former President Donald Trump: the worst pandemic in a century, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War — all simultaneously, that’s what he walked into.
But he also talked about where things stand now, his personal ambition and his belief that his record does warrant a second term. He wants a second term — you hear that when he talks about what he plans to do these next six months. But Biden also acknowledges that ambition can’t be bigger than the needs of the nation and the needs of the nation to stay with this form of government — what he called one of the greatest ideas in the history of the world.
Biden’s speech was a tentpole in terms of what patriotism and selfless service look like. He posits a view of the presidency that is directly opposite to the idea of authoritarianism and autocracy. He talked about being in the Oval Office, about the portraits of presidents past who surround him, and he said: “I revere this office. But I love this country more.”
What the autocrat loves is the office — and then the country must be supplicant to the ruler, that the most important thing about a country is who’s in charge. Instead, Biden said the role of a president is to make sure the country is protected, not for the country to serve the president.
That’s the basic idea of the American presidency. It’s why the president and the executive branch are a co-equal branch in our government, designed to keep the country on track if any one of those branches goes off the rails.
It’s also the opposite idea of what his opponent is offering in this election. Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, said in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention that America is not an idea. But it is. It’s the idea that we are a democracy of, by and for the people and that the president is not a king and that we’re all bound by the same rule of law. There’s no “I alone can fix it” in the vision of the United States that Joe Biden talked about.
Biden’s voice may be faltering, his delivery may not be as strong as we remember it — even at the beginning of this term — but his vision is clear. He understands that the moment we’re in is about whether or not we continue as a republic, and that’s not a hyperbolic thing to say. He’s saying it’s not about me; it’s about whether or not we’re going to stay the United States of America.
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This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
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