TIME TO STAND AGAIN:

On October 6, Joe Biden gave a 22-minute speech near the famous battlefield of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He began it succinctly, "On July 4, 1863, America woke to the remains of perhaps the most consequential battle ever fought on American soil. It took place here on this ground in Gettysburg. Three days of violence, three days of carnage. 50,000 casualties wounded, captured, missing or dead. Over three days of fighting." In November 1863, President Lincoln came to the battlefield to deliver the Gettysburg Address, which historian James McPherson called "the most famous speech in American history . . . only 272 words in length and took two minutes to deliver," short enough to be reproduced on the walls of D. C.'s Lincoln Memorial.  [...]

In his Gettysburg speech, alluding to Lincoln's House Divided Speech of 1858, Biden stated that "once again, we are a house divided. But that, my friends, can no longer be." He warned of our shipwrecked state being "on the shoals of anger and hate and division." 

Again citing Lincoln's words, this time his Second Inaugural--"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds"--he pledged to "work with Democrats and Republicans," to "work as hard for those who don't support me as for those who do." For our times of bitter rancor, he offered the balm of trying to "revive a spirit of bipartisanship in this country, a spirit of being able to work with one another." (For lists of the large numbers of Republicans, already opposing Trump and supporting Biden, including many conservative columnists, see here and here.)

Although Biden did not mention Barack Obama, the leader and friend he worked so closely with for eight years, his remarks also reflected the spirit of the former president. A spirit demonstrated in his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, when he was still an Illinois state senator, in which he called for overcoming Red-state-Blue-state divisions, for overcoming "those who are preparing to divide us." A spirit also demonstrated frequently as president, for example during his 2010 commencement address to University of Michigan graduates, when he told them, "We can't expect to solve our problems if all we do is tear each other down. You can disagree with a certain policy without demonizing the person who espouses it." 

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