{"id":1311723,"date":"2019-06-23T21:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-06-24T03:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.postindependent.com\/thiessen-column-bidens-problem-with-democrats-is-that-he-doesnt-hate-republicans\/"},"modified":"2019-06-23T21:00:00","modified_gmt":"2019-06-24T03:00:00","slug":"thiessen-column-bidens-problem-with-democrats-is-that-he-doesnt-hate-republicans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/local-news\/thiessen-column-bidens-problem-with-democrats-is-that-he-doesnt-hate-republicans\/","title":{"rendered":"Thiessen column: Biden\u2019s problem with Democrats is that he doesn\u2019t hate Republicans"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
Marc A. Thiessen<\/strong>
AAA<\/em><\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

WASHINGTON \u2014 Let\u2019s get this straight: Joe Biden is leading in the polls for the Democratic presidential nomination because he\u2019s the most \u201celectable\u201d candidate in the Democratic field? A guy who doesn\u2019t realize that I worked with segregationists isn\u2019t a winning message with Democrats in 2020?<\/p>\n

This is what you get when you turn to a candidate who has been in Washington for 46 years. Biden was first elected to the Senate in 1972, when the Democratic Party was very different than it is today. As a freshman senator, he had to get along with the senior leadership of his party \u2014 which included segregationists James Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia.<\/p>\n

You may be thinking: Who in the world are James Eastland and Herman Talmadge? You\u2019re not alone. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of living Americans had either forgotten their names or never heard of them in the first place, until Biden decided to dredge them up from the fever swamps of the Democratic Party\u2019s sordid racial past.<\/p>\n

Why, you ask, would he do such a thing? Because that\u2019s what Joe Biden does. He is a walking, talking gaffe machine. His point didn\u2019t even make sense. He was trying to argue that he can work across the aisle with people with whom he fundamentally disagrees. But Eastland and Talmadge sat on the same side of the aisle as Biden in the Senate; they were Democrats.<\/p>\n

So now his younger, less popular Democratic opponents are pouncing on Biden\u2019s mistake. California Sen. Kamala Harris (averaging 7.1% in the polls) declared that for Biden \u201cto coddle the reputations of segregationists, of people who if they had their way I would literally not be standing here as a member of the United States Senate, is, I think, it\u2019s just misinformed and it\u2019s wrong.\u201d New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker (2.3%) declared, \u201cVice President Biden\u2019s relationships with proud segregationists are not the model for how we make America a safer and more inclusive place for black people, and for everyone.\u201d New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (0.3%) tweeted, \u201cIt\u2019s 2019 & @JoeBiden is longing for the good old days of \u2018civility\u2019 typified by James Eastland. Eastland thought my multiracial family should be illegal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Give me a break. No reasonable person thinks that Biden was defending or even sympathetic to segregation. What Biden was trying to do \u2014 in his own, Bideny way \u2014 was to defend not segregation but civility and compromise. But sadly, in today\u2019s Democratic Party, those ideas are just as controversial.<\/p>\n

Recall that in February, Biden was forced to apologize for declaring \u2014 brace yourself \u2014 that Vice President Pence was a \u201cdecent guy.\u201d Then, a few months later, Biden had to backtrack on his effort to craft a middle-ground approach to climate change that would be embraced by both environmentalists and blue-collar voters. After Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., thundered, \u201cThere is no \u2018middle ground\u2019 when it comes to climate policy,\u201d Biden soon embraced the Green New Deal.<\/p>\n

And this month, Biden was forced to flip-flop and abandon his four-decade-long support for the Hyde amendment \u2014 bipartisan legislation that bars public funding for abortions \u2014 after his Democratic opponents attacked him for reaffirming what he once proudly called his \u201cmiddle-of-the-road\u201d policy on abortion. Biden has also been forced to apologize for his support for the bipartisan 1994 crime bill, which was signed into law by Democrat Bill Clinton but which Democrats now blame for the mass incarceration of African Americans. \u201cI haven\u2019t always been right\u201d on criminal justice, he declared earlier this year.<\/p>\n

In today\u2019s Democratic Party, \u201ccompromise\u201d and \u201cconsensus\u201d are dirty words. Biden\u2019s problem is not that he is a closet racist; it\u2019s that he does not hate Republicans and other political opponents. As he put it on Tuesday, \u201cToday, you look at the other side and you\u2019re the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy. We don\u2019t talk to each other anymore.\u201d That is the point he was trying to make in his ham-handed way. And that is what his Democratic opponents are really upset about.<\/p>\n

In a January speech, Biden said, \u201cI read in The New York Times today that one of my problems if I were to run for president, I like Republicans. Okay, well, bless me, Father, for I have sinned.\u201d Apparently, for many on the left, that sin is unforgivable.<\/p>\n

Follow Marc A. Thiessen on Twitter, @marcthiessen. (c) 2019, The Washington Post Writers Group<\/p>\n

via:: Post Independent<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marc A. ThiessenAAA WASHINGTON \u2014 Let\u2019s get this straight: Joe Biden is leading in the polls for the Democratic presidential nomination because he\u2019s the most \u201celectable\u201d candidate in the Democratic field? A guy who doesn\u2019t realize that I worked with segregationists isn\u2019t a winning message with Democrats in 2020? This is what you get when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[160],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1311723","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-19 14:18:04","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSKE Ski Country","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1311723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1311723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1311723\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1311723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1311723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1311723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}