President Joseph R. Biden seemed more like “Father Joe” during his inauguration, according to CBS News’ Major Garrett.
The network’s chief Washington correspondent fawned over the Democrat’s speech and likened it to something straight from The Good Book.
“The beginning had a soaring rhetoric. A tiny bit at the end. The middle, it sounded like a homily,” Mr. Garrett said Wednesday. “A breaking down of all this big language to simple colloquial terms. ‘I’m just talking to you. I’m in this vaunted position.’ But like a priest explaining something from the Bible or something. ’I’m breaking it down for you so we can all have a common language and a common understanding.’”
The comments came after Mr. Biden warned Americans that climate change and “white supremacy” posed an existential threat to the nation.
“A cry for survival comes from the planet itself,” Mr. Biden said. “A cry that can’t be any more desperate or any more clear. And now, a rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat. To overcome these challenges — to restore the soul and to secure the future of America — requires more than words. It requires that most elusive of things in a democracy: Unity. Unity.”
The media watchdog NewsBusters noted that Mr. Garrett wasn’t alone in his praise for the new commander in chief.
“There’s few politicians in Washington, perhaps no politicians in Washington who can lay claim to that kind of message like Joe Biden can,” chief White House correspondent Nancy Cordes said. “I mean, look, he was in the Senate for 36 years. And he had a reputation there of trying to work across the aisle. He was often the person that President Obama dispatched to Capitol Hill to try to cut a deal during his eight years as vice president.”
CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell added that Mr. Biden’s career speaks to his “natural tendency to think of others.”
• Douglas Ernst can be reached at dernst@washingtontimes.com.
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