Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With Allie Bice. Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Alex | Email Tina | Email Max When JOE BIDEN ran for president, it was on an explicit pledge to “restore the soul” of the nation and bring unity across the partisan divide. In his speech marking the anniversary of the Jan. 6 riots, he made what amounted to a concession: Unity will have to wait. The speech, a blistering, fairly dark reflection on the state of U.S. politics, can be viewed in a number of ways: A case for prioritizing voting rights legislation, an impassioned plea to buttress democracy, or a direct volley against former President DONALD TRUMP. Fundamentally, however, it was Biden explaining that there can be no unity unless the forces of political division are confronted first. His former boss, BARACK OBAMA, was fond of saying that the fever would break. Biden, on Thursday, said those in power must choose to break it. “The country is broken right now and if you think about it like a broken bone you don’t heal the bone by acting like it isn’t broken,” is how TOM PERRIELLO, the former Democratic congressman and diplomat put it. “You have to reset the bone. And if the person who broke it in the first place is standing there with a baseball bat ready to break it again, you have to protect against that bat.” The White House had a choice. They could have treated today as an affair fit only for reflection and solemnity. Or they could have treated it as a matter of politics; a time to shun the forces that caused the riots in the first place. They chose the latter, as summarized nicely in LAURA BARRÓN-LÓPEZ’s piece covering the speech. And though Sen. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-S.C.) took to Twitter to criticize the politicization of the anniversary, few others seemed concerned. It was not just because it is inherently ridiculous to insist that the remembrance of a day in which rioters tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power should now be devoid of politics; but because both sides of the ledger have come to view the events of Jan. 6 as the defining fault line in American politics. Trump certainly does. He spent today sending out statements insisting that all the pathos was a ruse, designed to flip the script on the real victims: he and his voters. “To watch Biden speaking is very hurtful to many people,” began one of his missives. Biden couldn’t simply ignore the fault line. Nor could he tiptoe around it. He addressed it head on. “I did not seek this fight brought to this capitol one year ago today,” the president said. “But I will not shrink from it either. I will stand in this breach.” For Democrats, it was soothing to see. Perriello, who had been with family and without power for the past few days, said he watched it with his mother and caught her weeping as she looked on. “She was like, ‘This gives me hope for America again,’” he explained. “It is a silent majority moment. People want someone to stand up. This is what happens with bullies. People cower…. They wait for someone to stand up who is stronger and when someone does, they can exhale.” The question now is whether Biden will sustain it. PATRICK GASPARD, who heads the Democratic-leaning thinking tank Center for American Progress, made the point on Twitter that what made the speech powerful was that Biden has been selective in how often he’s given a variation of it. Whether that means Biden waits until he gives an address like this again is to be seen. He and Vice President KAMALA HARRIS head to Atlanta next week to speak about the fight to protect voting rights. “He has a sense of justice, equity, inclusive democracy, that comes more from the sting of lived experiences than from discerning study,” Gaspard said. “So it stands that he would ultimately be at his best and most natural when he’s drawing from that deep reservoir of earned moral convictions to contextualize a crisis or an opportunity.” But Perriello added a broader point — that speechifying alone wasn’t enough. Rather, Biden and others must work to turn admonishments over Jan. 6 into actual accountability. “Impunity almost always leads to subsequent bias whereas accountability almost always stabilizes,” he said. “In almost every case, a formal sense of accountability and truth telling are essential to establishing the core foundations of democracy and its institutions.” Do you work in the Biden administration? Are you in touch with the White House? Are you JAMAL SIMMONS, communications director for the vice president? We want to hear from you — and we’ll keep you anonymous. Email us at westwingtips@politico.com or you can text/Signal Alex at 8183240098. | 
