In with the new

JOE BIDEN, 78, yesterday became the oldest president of the United States. However, if his presidency is to succeed, he must find new ways of doing things.

That the Biden White House will be different, and dramatically so, from the Donald Trump White House was signalled by the choice of inaugural poet at yesterday’s swearing-in ceremony: 22-year-old African American Amanda Gorman. Many of the issues the 46th US president will preside over will affect her generation and generations to come.

“The world is watching,” Mr Biden said on the steps of the US Capitol. “We will repair our alliances and engage with the world once again. Not to meet yesterday’s challenges, but today’s and tomorrow’s challenges.”

Among his first acts as president, Mr Biden signed executive orders to rejoin the Paris Agreement and to undo Mr Trump’s aggressive rollback of greenhouse gas policies. The permit for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline was rescinded and a temporary moratorium was imposed on drilling in Arctic reserves.

Different approaches are also required for new challenges.

Until now, the covid19 outbreak in the US has been met with an embarrassingly, devastatingly inept, indifferent and ineffective response. Mr Biden cannot compel all Americans to wear masks, but he nonetheless called for such masks to be mandatory on federal property from now on.

That in itself already a sea change for an Oval Office whose last occupant demurred on the question of mask-wearing as throughout the US, the world over, hundreds of thousands died.

Yet for all the new, the thing that Mr Biden was most keen to address as he delivered his inaugural address was as old as America itself.

“We must end this uncivil war,” Mr Biden said in front of a socially-distanced crowd. “I know that the forces that divide us are deep and they are real. But I also know they are not new. Our history has been a constant struggle.”

To meet this challenge, Mr Biden invoked figures like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. But he also turned to St Augustine, who once defined a people as a multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement on the objects of their love.

But the president also demonstrated a clear-eyed understanding that people, in his country and around the world, are tired of rhetoric and are cynical about whether things can and will change. In one of the most impassioned moments in his speech, he cited the very presence of vice president Kamala Harris as proof that glass ceilings can be shattered.

“Don’t tell me things can’t change,” he said. In the end, Mr Biden signalled his age is his strongest qualification. Because of it, he understands more than most the familiar challenges – challenges that demand new approaches.