Biden Still Is, And Always Will Be— And In Every Measurable Way— A Better Human Being Than Trump

I Just Used The Lowest Bar Ever

"Saving Joe Biden" by Nancy Ohanian

In 2020, the Democratic establishment used low-info voters in South Carolina to deprive front-runner Bernie Sanders of the Democratic nomination, handing it over to zombie “moderate” Joe Biden. Yeah, thanks for your service Jim Clyburn (age 83); if Trump becomes president, it will be because of you. Well… not totally because of you, of course.

Yesterday, NBC News ran a story, Black lawmakers are a key line of defense for Biden as he fights to save his campaign. A quintet of NBC reporters wrote that “Biden is counting on an important political firewall to help him stave off Democratic defections and save his flagging re-election campaign: leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus. On Monday, after a wave of congressional Democrats called for the president to step aside as the party’s nominee, Congressional Black Caucus Chair Steven Horsford (D-NV) reaffirmed his support for Biden in the wake of his disastrous debate performance against Trump last month. Horsford’s public support is significant given that he is facing a competitive race this fall.” This was before last night’s meeting between Biden and the CBC.

Black voters have been key to Biden's coalition. In the 2020 Democratic primaries, Black voters in South Carolina resuscitated his campaign and put him on the path to the presidency. In addition to choosing the first Black female vice president, he also nominated the first Black woman to be a Supreme Court justice. And now, keeping the support of Black lawmakers may be key to the president's political future once again.

…“Most members in the Congressional Black Caucus are institutionalists,” a senior aide to a CBC member told NBC News.

“It’s hard to imagine many of them going against an incumbent president that has passed many pieces of major legislation to benefit the Black community, and is connected to President Obama.”

…CBC members also have pushed back against criticism of aging politicians and generally been in favor of Democrats’ seniority system, which rewards the longest-serving members with coveted committee gavels. Black lawmakers currently serve as the top Democrat on five House committees.

Considering that Biden rose to prominence as kind of a racist this is pretty ironic. I should say that unlike Trump, Biden seems to have been cured of his racism.But back when he first ran for the Senate, his top issue was stopping busing and school integration. And it took a while for that hostility towards Blacks to go away. In 2019 Janell Ross reported, also for NBC News, that “In a 1975 Senate hearing, the legendary civil rights lawyer Jack Greenberg had something to say to freshman Sen. Joe Biden. Greenberg, longtime director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, took Biden to task for sponsoring a bill that would limit the power of courts to order school desegregation with busing. It was a move that followed the wishes of many of Biden’s white constituents in Delaware. The bill ‘heaves a brick through the window of school integration,’ said Greenberg, one of the lawyers who had won the Brown v. Board of Education case that ended legal school segregation 21 years earlier. And according to Greenberg, Biden was the man with his hand on the brick.”

Biden’s role in fighting student busing more than four decades ago has received renewed attention after the 76-year-old presidential candidate touted his ability to compromise with segregationists during his long Senate career. Biden said he disagreed strongly with these Southerners’ views but needed to work with them to get things done. Biden’s comments set off a firestorm among his political rivals and some political analysts, who described his language as offensive and anachronistic.

But political experts and education policy researchers say Biden, a supporter of civil rights in other arenas, did not simply compromise with segregationists— he also led the charge on an issue that kept black students away from the classrooms of white students. His legislative work against school integration advanced a more palatable version of the “separate but equal” doctrine and undermined the nation’s short-lived effort at educational equality, legislative and education history experts say.

“Biden, who I think has been good overall on civil rights, was a leader on anti-busing,” Rucker Johnson, author of the book Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works, said. “A leader on giving America the language to oppose it despite it being the most effective means of school integration at that time.”

…In 1975, Biden was representing a state where one of the first major urban school desegregation plans had been ordered by a court. Many white parents in the Wilmington area were angry. In response, Biden sponsored not just the bill limiting courts’ power but also an amendment to an appropriations bill that barred the federal government from withholding funding from schools that remained effectively segregated.

The amendment went beyond the busing issue, affecting school systems that effectively separated students by race whether or not they used busing. Co-sponsors included segregationist Sens. Jesse Helms (R-NC) and Strom Thurmond (R-SC). The amendment passed the Senate on a 50-43 vote, including majorities of both Democrats and Republicans. (Biden was not alone among northern Democrats who supported it— in that group, 14 supported the amendment and 26 opposed it, according to the Congressional Quarterly.)

When Biden rose to defend the amendment, he said that the “assignment of schools and/or classes because of a person's race ... is a counterproductive concept that is causing more harm to equal education than any benefit.”

Biden’s anti-integration efforts didn’t end in 1975. Two years later, he co-authored a bill that barred federal courts from ordering busing plans unless courts found evidence of discriminatory intent. That legislation failed.

A 1977 report on school desegregation by the Civil Rights Commission, a federal agency, described Biden’s activities as stymieing school integration.

Federal data analyzed by Johnson and other researchers shows that busing succeeded in narrowing racial achievement gaps before frontal assaults and legislative maneuvers by Biden and others rendered it easier for districts under court order to be released from integration demands. America’s school integration efforts lasted, all told, no more than 15 years, Johnson said.

Johnson has reviewed data on more than 10,000 students from this period, who were studied for decades afterward. He found that black adults who spent the most time in integrated schools attained more education, completed college, maintained better health and earned higher incomes than peers who spent less time or no time in integrated schools. All of this happened without any reduction in white student grades or outcomes, the data shows. And white adults who attended integrated schools reported better understanding of issues affecting nonwhite Americans.

“Integration is a social good which also happens to make for high-quality education,” said Johnson, an economist and professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. “It is also the one thing that has worked but the one thing most people don’t want to talk about and many people fight if we even try.”

Biden was particularly effective in fighting integration because he did not use the overtly racist language of the segregationists, who warned of race mixing and black inferiority, Johnson said. Instead, Biden, along with other centrists and liberals, talked about “forced busing,” “local control” and “parents’ rights.”

… [T]o critics, Biden’s cozy familiarity with deal-making among white men does not pair well with the often uncomfortable, sometimes disruptive, work of creating equality.

“Is this the model of politics and government that he’s operating in today?” said Brenda Carter, director of the Reflective Democracy Campaign, which aims to change the demographics of political power.

These critics want to know whether Biden would be an ally in this fight for equality. While children of color comprise the majority of students in public K-12 classrooms, most attend low-quality, highly segregated schools.

“For those of us who didn’t have any power and had no seat at the bargaining table, this is part of the reason we are so deeply in need of bodacious, radical reforms today,” said LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, which advocates for expanded voting access.

Biden’s use of “not segregationists but avowed racists as a reference point for how you work across the aisle,” she said, “begs the question of literally who is he trying to appeal to.”

Jonathan Tobin is a right-wing, professional Zionist and he penned a poisonous article against Biden for The Federalist that was published yesterday. He’s offended that in the battle to get Biden to withdraw as a candidate, Democrats and the media keep calling him "a good man.” To Tobin and other far right fanatics, he’s anything but. A bit of a fringe crank, Tobin wrote that “the notion that ‘Scranton Joe’ is a nice guy is as wrongheaded as the claim that he’s mentally competent or a brilliant leader. The one constant about Biden has been his essential meanness, which, when combined with his well-known predilection for telling tall tales about his own life, is a formula for slander of all those who are not materially contributing to his success.” I’ll leave the litany of right wing smears “proving” that Trump is the lesser evil of the two at the link. It’s what Fox’s audience thinks about Biden.

Rob Reiner is nothing like Fox’s audience. He posted this on Sunday, a week after he hosted a fat cat campaign fundraiser for Biden at his Brentwood mansion, attended by Kamala Harris. Also... you might want to listen carefully to what Jon Stewart had to say about the Biden campaign on the Daily Show yesterday.