MSNBC national affairs analyst John Heilemann said during his network’s coverage of President Joe Biden’s inauguration ceremony that seeing the past president’s standing with Biden was like “the Avengers, sort of the Marvel superheroes back up there together.”
Heilemann said, “We had the insurrection two weeks ago. Last week we had the impeachment and with the inauguration today. Amazing, huge seismic stories that even in 32 years of being in and out of Washington and covering this stuff, I’ve never experienced a period like this that has been more unnerving and more unsettling.”
He continued, “An inauguration unlike any other, fortified Capital 25,000 National Guard troops, all of the social distancing, the masks and everything else. And yet, the thing that was to me so striking about today was that, kind of comforting sense, even with the masks, even with the distancing, even without the crowd, those shots inside Statuary Hall that we’re familiar with from every inauguration. The sight of the Clintons and the Bushes and the Obamas, the Avengers, sort of the Marvel superheroes back up there together all in one place with their friend Joe Biden. All of them, I think, feeling — all of them sharing that same view that a lot of Americans had which is that we did narrowly avert catastrophe in America and that they were all there to kind of buttress their buddy Joe Biden and see him in some ways as the natural and necessary corrective to what’s been going on.”
He added, “There was a lot about the speech that was soaring. It may have been the best speech Joe Biden has ever given. It was important in that it was not a political speech at all. It was a speech that had a much higher purpose than that, and I don’t want to go overboard and compare to it Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, but aspirationally that’s where it wanted to live.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.