Welcome to Beg to Differ, the Bullworks Weekly Roundtable discussion

featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum, from center left to

center right. I'm Mona Charon, indicated columnist and policy editor of The Bullwork and I'm Mona Charon, syndicated columnist and policy editor of the Bullwork and I'm joined by our regulars Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution and the Wall Street Journal, Linda Chavez of the Niskanin Center and Damon Linker of the week.

Our special guest this week is Pete Wainer, a contributor to the New York Times and

senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Biden era.

Yesterday was the inauguration.

We are recording this on Thursday. So let's start with you, Damon. You had some

thoughts about the speech, specifically about the call for unity.

Yeah, I mean, I thought it was an effective speech,

not really anything that memorable as far as rhetoric goes but it was heartfelt and

passionate and

had a lot of nice aspirational language in it.

I, you know, and I'm not, I wouldn't put myself

in the camp of a lot of people on the kind of more

extreme partisan right and left who denounce the call to unity because they just want to keep

attacking the other side and how dare you say that we should stop the battle now when it's just getting interesting.

My view is more just that I hope that this really is just kind of aspirational language for the address and that Biden does not seriously

intend on trying to govern for the sake of achieving unity.

He needs unity to get certain things done through Congress,

absolutely. But there are lots of other things that he's going to want to do, that he's going

to have to do right over the objections of the Republican Party.

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