President Joe Biden characterizes his opponents on Capitol Hill as worse than the segregationists.
“I’ve been a senator since ’72,” the president told rich San Franciscans giving him money this week. “I’ve served with real racists. I’ve served with Strom Thurmond. I’ve served with all these guys that have set terrible records on race. But guess what? These guys are worse. These guys do not believe in basic democratic principles.”
Biden, of course, eulogized Thurmond, per the late senator’s request, at his 2003 funeral. He characterized his relationship with Thurmond as one of “good friends,” said Fritz Hollings — a Southern Democrat, albeit one not easily pigeonholed as a segregationist — was his closest friend in the U.S. Senate, and described segregationist John Stennis as someone who became his friend. In 2020, he apologized, in the midst of attacks on him by fellow Democrats for his opposition to bussing almost a half-century earlier, for delivering the eulogy.
The de rigueur practice of condemning the dead for offenses against the ever-changing yet deeply held convictions of the living did not overwhelm the United States or even the Democrat Party in 2003. Biden’s measured remembrance of Thurmond, who was, as Biden hinted, too “complex” and lived too long a life to reduce to a one-word obituary (“racist!”), should not have required an apology.
But the graceless world Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats created — one of statutory murder and names sandblasted off buildings and $50,000 spent to remove a 42-ton boulder from a campus because people long ago gave it a racist nickname — necessitated such a mea maxima culpa, so one cannot feel excessive sympathy for one so obviously hoisted on his own petard.
One could interpret the cannonade Biden fired at Republicans in one of two ways. Either it says his political opponents occupy a particularly cretinous wrung on the morality ladder or that he never really found segregationists all that repugnant. The president clearly intended to say the former. His actions as a politician scream the latter.
When Joe Biden first won elective office, former Klansman and fellow Democrat Hugo Black still sat on the U.S. Supreme Court. During Biden’s tenure in the U.S. Senate, he repeatedly voted for Robert Byrd, a former Ku Klux Klan Exalted Cyclops, to lead Democrats in that body. He served alongside segregationists James Eastland, John Sparkman, and Herman Talmadge without any contemporaneous complaint.
Biden befriended rather than anathematized segregationists in real time. It was a more collegial body back then, after all, so one questions whether to condemn the civility then or the rancor now. All these years later, he carts out the racist Democrats — 99 percent of segregationists belonged to Biden’s party — he chummed around with in the U.S. Senate to tar the opposing party. The racists have their uses as boogeymen for Biden — in sliming Robert Bork during the 1980s or Donald Trump supporters today — decades after the fact.
In other words, when they wandered the halls of the Capitol — on their last political breaths — as 30-year-old Joe Biden entered the Senate, Southern racists did not repel him. He joined their party, after all, and forged friendships and alliances with them. All these years later, when they roam Congress merely as ghosts rather than flesh and blood, Biden uses what then did not scare him to now scare voters away from his political adversaries.