Will His Career-Long Racism Finally Sink Biden's Campaign?

The far right Club for Growth is one of the sponsors planning to advertise during the Democratic debate Wednesday— but not on Fox— just on MSNBC and NBC in Iowa, aiming not to reach Trump supporters but Democratic voters. Ginger Gibson, reporting for Reuters, wrote that “Club for Growth's poll found voters are less inclined to vote for Biden if they were told he previously had taken positions that include opposing slavery reparations and busing of school children as part of desegregation systems.” And that’s just what their ad does, attack Biden for his pre-Obama career as a racist.

"Joe Biden’s past statements and positions on race issues present a serious challenge to his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination according to our polling," Club for Growth President David McIntosh said in a statement to Reuters.

"This poll and the coming ad are designed to help voters and observers of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary understand the field as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the frontrunner, former Vice President Joe Biden."

…The Club for Growth poll— which included 1,000 voters in the 18 states that are the first to hold primary contests— reaffirmed Biden's position as a frontrunner. It found, like other polls, that Biden's lead is being fueled largely by black voters. The poll found 46% of black voters, 29% of Hispanic voters and 33% white voters are backing Biden. Polls have been showing that Biden’s biggest demographic support comes from older, less educated African-American women.

The ad is expected to be a dry run for what Americans can expect from the Trump reelection campaign if the Democrats are foolish enough to give the party nomination to a life-long racist pig. Trump may even be a worse racist pig— or, at least, as bad a racist pig— but it the Democrats who need to votes from anti-racists, not Trump. Trump’s goal will be simple: depress voters turn out among African-American voters and their allies if Biden is the nominee.

An article for the New Republic by Matt Ford, Joe Biden’s Racial Dog Whistle, looked at the first brawl of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, after the early frontrunner, stumbled clumsily into praising 2 dead arch-segregationist senators for the "civility" and his own ability to work with them to get things done— in this case, the “things” being his top issue: ending school busing as a tool of integration. "We got things done," Biden told a gaggle of rich Wall Street donors, seeking to evoke the glow of that less combative (albeit more racist) legislative era. "[T]oday you look at the other side and you’re the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy,” said Biden after reassuring the banksters that a Biden administration— unlike a Bernie administration or an Elizabeth Warren adminstration— would look at them sympathetically. “Nothing will fundamentally change,” Status Quo Joe promised them as he solicited their campaign checks.

In response, Cory Booker suggested in no uncertain terms that Biden apologize for praising two of the worst racist senators of the Jim Crow era. Biden didn’t get it and, Trump-like, demanded that Booker apologize to him for daring to suggest that Joe Biden had even one racist bone in his body. Joe being Joe— a typical Biden foot in mouth move while trying to convince wealthy supporters that he and he alone can negotiate with Republicans in good faith and "get things done." Ford notes that the controversy has exposed a troubling aspect of Biden's presidential bid: a tendency to campaign just like his nemesis, Trump and to then try to bluster and lie his way out of it, just like Trump. Ford wants his readers to understand why, exactly Biden expects Republicans to "work with him after they waged a relentless and savage war against Obama. "Biden’s answer,” wrote Ford, is always implied and never spoken aloud: because he’s like them.” Biden has many of the same values that the Republicans in Congress have— the sympathy for the billionaire class demonized by Bernie, the racism that most Democrats have rejected, the whole women’s Choice issue that Biden has never understood, and the willingness to compromise away progressive accomplishments going back decades. “Both men built their campaigns on nostalgia for a bygone era that may have never existed,” wrote Ford. “Biden also shares Trump’s habit of never admitting error or apologizing for mistakes. His remarks on Wednesday show how he’s mirroring another strategy that propelled Trump to victory— one that sets him far apart from any of his Democratic rivals.”

That Biden would praise rather than condemn Eastland is jarring. Whatever civility the Mississippi senator extended to a young white Northerner like him did not reach his own black constituents. Robert Caro’s Master of the Senate recounts how Eastland spoke to a crowd during the Montgomery bus boycott with the language of a would-be genocidaire. “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to abolish the Negro race, proper methods should be used,” he said. “Among these are guns, bows and arrows, slingshots and knives.... All whites are created equal with certain rights, among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of dead niggers.”

It’s tempting to describe Biden’s remarks as an Uncle Joe gaffe. What they actually reflect is the overarching theme of his campaign: that he has the experience, skill, and willingness to work with his Republican opponents, overcoming hyper-partisanship where other Democrats can’t or won’t. Last week, he made the improbable argument that he could convert Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s arch-obstructionist majority leader, into a reasonable, good-faith negotiator. As I noted then, Biden’s claim that the Kentucky senator and his fellow Republicans will “see the light” after Trump stretches all credulity. As Biden knows all too well, McConnell spent eight years blocking the Obama administration’s agenda whenever possible, and now brags about turning the chamber into a “graveyard” for House Democrats’ legislation.

…Serving as Obama’s vice president for eight years didn’t just give Biden a front-row seat to the persistence and wreckage of Republican partisan warfare. It’s also redounding to his benefit with Democratic voters today, in spite of his mixed history on race.

Biden’s track record on civil rights isn’t as straightforward as he suggests: Though he supported racial integration in Delaware, he clashed with local black leaders on busing in the 1970s. In the Senate, Biden helped craft the passage of laws that became the scaffolding for mass incarceration and presided over the Senate Judiciary Committee when it mistreated Anita Hill in 1991. But Biden remains extraordinarily popular among black voters, especially among the older generations. His proximity to the first black president is undoubtedly a boon.

Not identical-- but close enough

What explains Biden’s confidence that he can succeed where Obama failed? Invoking his relationships with Eastland and Talmadge offers a clue. I’m reminded of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s description of whiteness as an “ancestral talisman” and a “bloody heirloom,” one that “cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them.” Past presidents who carried that metaphorical token of racial identity usually wielded it in more subtle ways. But Donald Trump, Coates wrote in 2017, “cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.” The president’s willingness to define himself through his whiteness set him apart from his rivals in 2016, eventually helping to elevate him to the White House.

Biden carries that talisman, too. He hasn’t unleashed its power in full; he does not share Trump’s antipathy toward immigrants and people of color. But the self-described working-class son of Scranton, Pennsylvania, is more than willing to brandish it to win the presidency. How could Biden build bridges in Washington where everyone else has failed? Why does it matter in 2019 that a Dixiecrat called him “son” and segregationists treated him with civility? Why would McConnell, of all people, work with him after a decade of all-out partisan warfare against Obama? Biden’s answer is always implied and never spoken aloud: because he’s like them.

Club for Growth will be inadvertently doing the Democrats-- and the country-- the biggest favor of all if they manage to sink Status Quo Joe's campaign. Let’s hope they run their ad in South Carolina and Nevada as well as in Iowa. Hey... and how about on BET?