Joe Biden will deliver his inaugural address later today before an empty National Mall and a divided nation. GBH Morning Edition Host Joe Mathieu spoke with Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School, about the tough road ahead for the Biden adminsitration and how this very first speech as president of the United States can set the tone for the next four years. The transcript below has been edited for clarity.
Joe Mathieu: Happy Inauguration Day. I know that despite all of the madness of the last couple of weeks, you and I share some really wonderful memories from inaugurations and we hope today will be another. You wrote a great column for Brookings in which you look at the inaugural speeches of Abraham Lincoln and FDR — two presidents, Elaine, who faced daunting challenges as they entered office. Joe Biden has his own version now [in] the midst of a deadly pandemic, an economic downturn and half the country does not believe he actually won the election. What does he need to say today?
Elaine Kamarck: I think that what he needs to say today is that he's going to do something, and I would put that in exclamation marks. One of the many problems with Donald Trump is that he really has been missing in action as this pandemic began and as it got worse and worse. As you noted [and] as many people have noted, starting on Election Day, he said absolutely nothing about the pandemic at a time when it was raging even worse than it was last spring. So I think Joe Biden's very, very first job is to say to Americans, "I know you're hurting, I know you're in pain, and I'm going to work day and night on solving this problem for you," which is something that Donald Trump simply walked away from.
Mathieu: The new president, Joe Biden, will make an immediate impression with some executive orders that you've probably heard about now: rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement [and] ending the travel ban on some Muslim-majority countries. That will be done within hours, we understand, of his taking the oath. But is the focus on COVID, as you just outlined, the quickest way to building credibility?
Kamarck: Absolutely. There'll be two things he does. First of all, reversing the executive orders is not going to take a lot of his time, right? I'm sure that his lawyers have been preparing them for the last several months, if not for the last year. Undoing the Trump era will be one thing. But the big job in front of him is getting these vaccines into the arms of Americans, mostly because so much else flows from that. We don't have a pandemic and an economic crisis. The two are the same; we have an economic crisis because of the pandemic. So the sooner that the Biden administration can get ahold of the pandemic [and] start getting people vaccinated, the sooner the economy will start to improve.
Mathieu: Elaine, you created the Clinton administration's National Performance Review, so you have a unique understanding of what resources the White House actually has. I'd like to ask you about the plan for the economy. Joe Biden has picked Janet Yellen to run the Treasury. Wall Street seems to love that idea. He's also chosen [Boston] Mayor Walsh to run the Labor Department and he has a Democratic-run Congress to pass another stimulus; we're not sure how large it will be. Does that give you hope for a recovery this year?
Kamarck: Oh, absolutely. First of all, I think that they will get a stimulus, especially because they have effective control of the Senate. So that's very important. And the stimulus, hopefully, will get us through to the fall when it is expected that there'll be more vaccines and we can start to get to that magic word, herd immunity. So hopefully the stimulus will come rather quickly, although I'm sure there's Republicans that are going to resist it. And I think that the team that he's got is going to go a long way towards reversing the Trump era and then laying out an ambitious legislative plan for the rest of the Biden administration. But there are first things first, and the first thing they've got to do is pass a stimulus bill.
Mathieu: Getting back to where we started here, Elaine, in your column about Biden's inaugural address that you say is in a time of crisis, how much poetry do we expect today? Is this going to be one of these speeches that we hear about for generations — "nothing to fear but fear itself," "the better angels of our nature," as you point out in your column — or is it going to be Joe Biden, "here's the deal?"
Kamarck: I'm just guessing now. I think it'll be more of Joe Biden, "here's the deal." One of the things even about that first inaugural address of Franklin Roosevelt, which is so famous for "we have nothing to fear but fear itself," most of that address was really about his assumption of executive powers to deal with the crisis before him. In fact, in my reading of the historians who write about Roosevelt is that what really hit people at the time was not the poetry, but the fact that he's going to do something. Because like Trump with the pandemic, Hoover — the predecessor to Franklin Roosevelt with the Depression — was kind of missing in action, and people were waiting for months and months for Washington to do something and they didn't. So I think when the country is facing this kind of internal crisis, the promise of action is, frankly, a lot more important in the short term than the rhetoric.
