Need I Remind You? Biden Is Less Horrible Than Trump

John Lewis developed cordial relationships with segregationists too— but, unlike Biden— he wasn’t working with them to stop school integration. Ever since Biden bragged to a roomful of wealthy donors how he worked with racist senators back in the day, the media has been asking what it was exactly he worked with them on. A couple of days ago the Washington Post’s Matt Viser and Annie Linskey wrote that Biden “was a freshman senator, the youngest member of the august body, when he reached out to an older colleague for help on one of his early legislative proposals: The courts were ordering racially segregated school districts to bus children to create more integrated classrooms, a practice Biden opposed and wanted to change.” The senator was notorious Mississippi racist James Eastland, who publicly referred to blacks as “an inferior race.” Another Biden-buddy was Herman Talmadge of Georgia, every bit as racist and bigoted as Eastland. Letters between these two and Biden show a type of relationship, “in which they were aligned on a legislative issue. Biden said at the time that he did not think that busing was the best way to integrate schools in Delaware and that systemic racism should be dealt with by investing in schools and improving housing policies (in other words, “separate but equal,” which had already been exposed as a racist tactic to keep blacks in their place).

Biden’s campaign late Thursday issued a statement saying that “the insinuation that Joe Biden shared the same views as Eastland on segregation is a lie.”

“Plain and simple. Joe Biden has dedicated his career to fighting for civil rights,” the statement said.

Except he hadn’t. Biden’s been lying— at least publicly— about his racist past since Obama picked him as a ticket-balancer for the 2008 election. Biden has been asking status quo conservatives in the Congressional Black Caucus to vouch for him. Some are. One of the Biden letters to Eastland says “My bill strikes at the heart of the injustice of court ordered busing. It prohibits the federal courts from disrupting our educational system in the name of the constitution where there is no evidence that the governmental officials intended to discriminate… I believe there is growing sentiment in the Congress to curb unnecessary busing."

Two years earlier the Senate had passed a Biden amendment that prohibited the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from ordering busing to achieve school integration. These were the years I discovered Biden and identified him as a political enemy, worse even than Joe Lieberman at the time. My opinion of him has been on a downward spiral ever since. Biden teamed up with segregationist senators and worked with them for years against integration. It’s hard to imagine that the deepest support Biden is getting now is from elderly African-American voters. I guess they either weren’t aware of Biden back then or have forgiven him— or think God really did create him out of one of Obama’s ribs.

Writing yesterday for The Atlantic centrist Edward-Isaac Dovere noted that Biden has always been looking for some kind of mythical centrist position on race and that newspaper archives are full of his efforts to explain his thinking on civil rights. Dovere is very sympathetic to Biden and The Atlantic should find another reporter to cover the candidate.

Biden thinks that’s his special insight into politics, that he’s a bridge builder— but it’s meant building bridges to people others think don’t deserve any kind of bridge. He seems to think that approach is especially useful over issues of race. There are archives full of comments, in newspaper accounts and videos, of Biden trying to explain his thinking on the matter. But given how much the conversation over race has changed in the past 50 years, that’s left him with a lot of remarks and relationships that can look out of sync in 2019, even as the 76-year-old former vice president says he’s still the same guy he always was. The comments reinforce a vulnerability— one his opponents have already jumped on.

The thread is there in his first big interview before his inaugural Senate run: “I have some friends on the far left, and they can justify to me the murder of a white deaf mute for a nickel by five colored guys. They say the black men had been oppressed and so on. But they can’t justify some Alabama farmers tar and feathering an old colored woman,” Biden said in November 1970, just as he was coming onto the political scene. He had just won his first election to the New Castle County Council, and he was featured in a major profile in the Wilmington, Delaware, News Journal with a splashy headline: “Joe Biden: Hope for Democratic Party in ’72?”

“I suspect the ACLU would leap to defend the five black guys,” Biden continued in the interview. “But no one would go down to help the ‘rednecks.’ They are both products of an environment. The truth is somewhere between the two poles. And rednecks are usually people with very real concerns, people who lack the education and skills to express themselves quietly and articulately.”

That was the thinking Biden seemed to be reflecting on Tuesday night at a New York City fundraiser when he recalled working with two of the most famous segregationists in the Senate. Pushing back on Democrats who’ve called for a take-no-prisoners approach to dealing with congressional Republicans, he noted that Senator James Eastland of Mississippi “never called me ‘boy’— he always called me ‘son.’” Henry Talmadge of Georgia, meanwhile, was “one of the meanest guys I ever knew,” Biden said.

“Well, guess what? At least there was some civility,” Biden added. “We got things done.”

Biden has reacted with frustration to the blowup, with most of his most prominent 2020 rivals, and a number of other prominent liberals, aghast that he could wistfully invoke names like Eastland, often known as “the voice of the white South.” That frustration has created another layer of issues: After Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey called on Biden to apologize, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, Kate Bedingfield, struggled to explain, in an appearance on CNN Friday morning, why Biden had said Booker should apologize to him instead.

Biden says he has nothing to apologize for and that his record speaks for itself. “I’ve been involved with civil rights my whole career—period, period, period,” Biden said on Wednesday evening, citing specifically his work extending the Voting Rights Act. That’s the defense from his campaign: His adviser Symone Sanders tweeted Wednesday afternoon that Biden “literally ran for office against an incumbent at 29 because of the civil rights movement.” Yesterday, she told me that Biden had run “because he disagreed with the segregationist senators in office at the time.” Biden didn’t seem to talk much about that particular motivation during his first Senate campaign, though a story the segregationist Senator John Stennis of Mississippi told late in life, which was recounted in a 2007 Delta Democrat-Times article, provides some backup. When Stennis asked Biden in 1973, according to the article, “‘Why did you get into politics?’ Biden looked him in the eye and said, ‘Civil rights.’”

Biden has struggled to explain himself on race and civil rights for decades, and for decades, liberals have been suspicious of those explanations— though perhaps never more so than now, with Biden campaigning on restoring the good ol’ days and many in his party arguing that those days weren’t as good as he remembers. (His campaign press secretary declined to comment on the candidate’s previous statements in his career.)

Once he arrived in the Senate in the early 1970s, Biden prioritized the fight against busing to integrate public schools, pushing for an amendment that he said would expose liberal doubts about the practice. In a Philadelphia Inquirer article in 1975, Biden said, “I think I’ve made it possible for liberals to come out of the closet.” When he was running for reelection in 1978, the Wilmington Morning News wrote that “the only substantive legislation bearing Biden’s name to reach the nation’s law books is the Biden-Eagleton Amendment, which has shut down efforts by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to achieve busing for school desegregation.”

Biden had placed himself firmly on one side of one of the fiercest fights about race of the 1970s (a position a spokesperson said in March he still stands by). He spoke often about how he did not believe in the theory behind busing—that there was a greater good achieved by that method of forcing integration. As he put it in a November 1976 speech, according to the News Journal, “black kids don’t want to come to your school any more than you want to go to their school.”

Biden argued that he was just pursuing common-sense solutions when he pushed back on liberals’ support for busing, along with racial quotas in schools. But he was making unsavory allies along the way. When he became chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1980— a position for which Eastland had backed him— Biden said he wouldn’t fight over busing with Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina senator and famous segregationist who’d become a friend. But, he told the News Journal in 1980, “if Strom Thurmond is serious about eliminating the Voting Rights Act, I’m going to fight it. I’ll be visible in that fight.”

News accounts at the time suggest that Biden was not integrally involved in crafting the reauthorization of the VRA. One referred to him as playing “second fiddle” in the process. But they do credit him with arranging a meeting between civil-rights activists and then– Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, in a move that helped get the bill passed and onto then-President Ronald Reagan’s desk.

Biden believes actions like these demonstrate his true character. He supported making Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday, calling the leader “the social conscience of this nation.” And he opposed Jeff Sessions’s 1986 nomination to a federal judgeship over his comments calling groups like the NAACP un-American.

Biden, like Trump an inveterate liar who can’t seem to tell the truth from self-serving stories about his history, painted himself a warrior for civil rights. He wasn’t. He always claimed he marched with Dr. Martin Luther King. He hadn’t. As far as I can tell, Biden was always a racist piece dog shit who would pretend when he had to that he was sympathetic to people he always worked against. Like Trump, when caught out in his lies, he just continued lying.

By September 1987, his campaign press secretary clarified to the New York Times that Biden “did participate in action to desegregate one restaurant and one movie theater.” Or as Biden once explained at a 1987 news conference, he’d been concerned about civil rights as a teenager, but he “was not out marching.” He’d “worked at an all-black swimming pool on the east side of Wilmington,” Biden said, and “was a suburbanite kid who got a dose of what was happening to black Americans.”

The middle is where and how Biden always thinks of himself. “I was never an activist,” Biden once said. “I didn’t march on Selma. Vietnam wasn’t a big issue in my college days. I was a middle-class kid in a sports coat.” Biden graduated from the University of Delaware in 1965, before the anti-war protests peaked. He enrolled in Syracuse University for law school, graduating in 1968, but he explained at the 1987 presser, using similar language, how he remained apart from what was happening in the streets. “By the time the war movement was at its peak ... I was married, I was in law school, I wore sports coats … I’m not big on flak jackets and tie-dyed shirts. And you know, that’s not me,” he said.

Yet for all the talk about civil rights, Biden never lost his personal fondness for the segregationists he worked with in the Senate. A decade before he delivered his now famous eulogy at Thurmond’s funeral— in which he called the old Dixiecrat “a product of his time”— Biden spoke at the senator’s 90th birthday party in Washington, D.C., in March 1993. Standing in a tuxedo, Biden compared Thurmond to the Confederate general Robert E. Lee: “an opponent without hate, a friend without treachery, a statesman without pretense, a soldier without cruelty and a neighbor without hypocrisy.” He talked, too, about Stonewall Jackson. Quoting the Confederate soldier James Power Smith writing about the general he served under, Biden said, “He was an avalanche from an unexpected quarter, a thunderbolt from the sky, and yet he was in character and will, more like a stone wall than any man that I have ever met.

“That seems to me to sum up Strom Thurmond: He is like a thunderbolt from the sky,” Biden continued. “He is a man who lives by his principles and a man who has gotten all of us to understand what they are.”

Like Trump did when he got called out for one of his racist antics, Biden said, “There’s not a racist bone in my body.” Clueless from head to toe, Status Quo Joe then said Cory Booker should apologize.

I don’t think Trump-- an insensitive oaf-- cares one way or the other about race. He’s a team player and his team happens to be racist... so he’s playing the racist too. But down deep, I doubt he really gives a hoot. If someone is rich and can do him some good, that’s more important than skin color. Biden, on the other hand, has always been a filthy, stinking racist at his core and I sense he still is and will always be. Over all, is Biden better than Trump? Sure… but they both get “F” grades from me.