President Biden trashed one of Abraham Lincoln’s most famous lines in a speech to the nation’s governors last weekend, saying he wanted to “get this word right.”
The 81-year-old president read aloud from a notecard at Saturday’s Governor’s Ball dinner, which appeared to include a quote from President Lincoln’s inaugural address.
“As I stand here in front of a portrait of the man behind me, I want to confirm that these words are accurate,” Biden began, standing in front of a painting of the 16th president. .
“He said, ‘We are the better angels,’ he said. ‘We must work on the counsel and adapt to the better angels of our nature.’ ”
“And we do it. And I remember very well what else he said. He said, ‘We are not enemies, we are friends.’
“This is in the middle of a civil war,” Biden continued.
“He said, ‘We are not enemies, but [we’re] Friends, we must not be enemies. ”
Biden appeared to be quoting from Lincoln’s first inaugural address in March 1861, in which Lincoln famously said: We must not be enemies.
President Lincoln told a divided nation: “Passion may be strained, but the bonds of affection must not be broken.”
“Mystical chords of memory extend from every battlefield and grave of a patriot to every living heart and stone of health throughout this wide land, and when touched again by the better angels, the Allied forces The chorus will rise again – as it most certainly will – our essence.”
Lincoln gave that speech in March 1861 — more than a month before Confederates fired on Fort Sumter and officially began the Civil War — and, as Biden suggested, in the middle of the war. It wasn’t.
Following his latest gaffe on Saturday, the president joked about his age but did not address the obvious gaffe.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve been there all along,” Biden told governors around the country.
“I know I don’t look like that. But I’ve been here a long time,” he joked.
“I say this with all my heart, but politics has become so bitter that we have sided with the Democrats and the Republicans.
“Politics has become too personal.” [sic]and that’s just a fact – it just wasn’t,” he said.
Mr. Biden’s latest gaffe comes as some in the Democratic Party have expressed concern about Mr. Biden’s use of notecards when speaking to supporters at private fundraisers.
Some donors are also said to have returned from fundraisers alarmed by Biden’s seeming insistence on writing to talk about policy issues he is supposed to know well.
