'Again we are a house divided': Joe Biden calls for unity in Gettysburg speech

Joe Biden delivered a forceful appeal for national unity from the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Tuesday, as the nation lurched from crisis to crisis and the president continued to downplay the severity of the coronavirus after being hospitalized for Covid-19.

From the storied civil war battlefield of Gettysburg, a symbol of the divisions that nearly tore the nation in two, Biden cast the election as a “battle for the soul of the nation” and emphasized the stakes this November.

“Today, once again we are a house divided,” Biden said, framed by a row of American flags with the rolling hills of Gettysburg behind him. “But that, my friend, can no longer be. We are facing too many crises. We have too much work to do. We have too bright a future to leave it shipwrecked on the shoals of anger and hate and division.”

In a sweeping speech – one that drew on Abraham Lincoln’s address at the same spot, the site of one of the war’s bloodiest battles, and Lyndon Johnson’s remarks from there one hundred years later – Biden warned of the “cost of division” and his fears that partisanship threatened to undermine the central pillars of American democracy.

Biden vowed to govern as an “American president”, one who would seek bipartisan solutions to the nation’s most consequential problems, including the coronavirus pandemic, racial injustice and economic turmoil.

Though he did not mention Trump by name, Biden’s remarks amounted to an extraordinary rebuke of the president’s leadership in the wake of a global pandemic that has killed more than 210,000 Americans and infected millions more, including the president and a widening circle of White House aides and allies. Lamenting the politicization of science and facts, he called for a national strategy.

“Wearing a mask isn’t a political statement – it’s a scientific recommendation,” Biden said, a surgical mask clenched in his fist. “We can’t undo what has been done. We can’t go back. But we can do better.”