Biden proves he’s a demagogue on race, yet his own record is terrible

OPINION:

When President Biden talks to a Black audience, he’s able to convey only one thought: The United States of America is a racist hellscape, and he’s the only hope for redemption. He cast himself in that savior role in a commencement address last weekend at Morehouse College, the historically Black male-only college in Atlanta.

But Mr. Biden is a bad choice to deliver that message, because he has spent a lifetime saying patently racist things, supporting racist policies, and hanging out with known racists. But it’s election season, and that means he’ll use race as a political weapon, even though he could be talking about himself more than anyone else.

At the beginning of his remarks, he tried to ingratiate himself with the Morehouse men by comparing his life experience to theirs.

“I was the first Biden to ever graduate from college,” he said, intending to leave the impression that he was the very first in his entire family to seek higher education because he assumed the new Morehouse graduates were like that, too.

This, however, was a lie of omission because he failed to say that his maternal grandfather, Ambrose Finnegan, played college football around the turn of the 20th century — a story he sometimes tells other audiences with different demographics.

The president also claimed that he was motivated to join the Civil Rights Movement when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (a Morehouse College graduate, coincidentally) was murdered in 1968, even though Mr. Biden famously admitted in 1987 that he was not really involved in the movement.

But that didn’t matter to Mr. Biden at Morehouse College on Sunday; he was there to make sure that the Black people present knew that he was their friend. And if that meant that he needed to describe this country as completely inhospitable to minorities, then he would do that.

“It’s natural to wonder if the democracy you hear about actually works for you,” Mr. Biden said, as though he has not been part of the federal government for over 50 years. “What is democracy, if Black men are being killed on the street? What is democracy, if a trail of broken promises still leave Black communities behind? What is democracy, if you have to be 10 times better than anyone else to get a fair shot? Most of all, what does it mean, as you’ve heard before, to be a Black man who loves his country, even if it doesn’t love him back in equal measure?”

The clear message is “America hates you.”

Does Mr. Biden realize he’s been president for almost four years?

He also threw in some gratuitous lies to make sure the graduates knew who the bad guys were and that he was not one of them.

“They won’t allow water to be available to you while you wait in line to vote in an election,” he falsely claimed about Georgia’s election laws.

And he pushed the lie that Republicans are banning certain history books to suppress the stories of Black Americans.

“They don’t see you in the future of America. But they’re wrong,” he said. “To me, we make history, not erase it.”

It’s sad that it needs to be said, but this is a complete fabrication.

Aside from those who turned their backs or walked out to protest the latest Israel-Hamas war, the crowd responded with scattered and unenthusiastic applause, an indication that they weren’t necessarily buying his act.

Nevertheless, we have witnessed the reemergence of Mr. Biden, who as vice president yelled at Black people that Mitt Romney (Mitt Romney!) would “put y’all back in chains!”

But why?

Because he’s losing to former President Donald Trump in his quest for reelection, because his poll numbers among Black voters are abysmal, and because he has a terrible record on race himself.

As a senator, Mr. Biden worked with segregationists to oppose busing to integrate public schools, which now-Vice President Kamala Harris famously cited in a Democratic primary debate in 2019 as racist.

In 1977, he said desegregating schools would cause his children to “grow up in a racial jungle.”

In 2007, he described then-Sen. Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean.”

In 2010, he eulogized Sen. Robert Byrd, a former exalted cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan, and called him “one of my mentors.”

And in 2020, he told a Black radio audience that if they didn’t vote for him, then “you ain’t Black.”

After 52 years in Washington, there is no disputing that Mr. Biden is a demagogue who shifts his views on race depending on the politics of the moment. So, when he tries to tell you who the racists are, understand that he’s mostly talking about himself.

• Tim Murtaugh is a Washington Times columnist, founder and principal of Line Drive Public Affairs LLC, and co-host of the “Line Drive Podcast.”