"Biden’s nostalgia for the good old days of backslapping, and his conviction that it can be revived through interpersonal charm, is a durable Washington myth."

"But Biden’s habit of invoking his friendship with segregationists to illustrate it is particularly dense. For one thing, the example doesn’t actually support the point he’s trying to make. Biden is attempting to tout his ability to work across the aisle, but he’s citing friendships with members of his own party.... For another, by citing segregationists, he is revealing the very reason the bipartisanship he longs for can’t return. The era of bipartisanship was built on suppressing racial conflict. The white South could only be cajoled into a coalition that supported bigger government by preventing African Americans from voting and, at times, outright denying them the benefits of government altogether. He’s invoking the most unappealing aspect of the bipartisanship era. You can argue that forging American consensus was worth the cost of suppressing racial conflict, but actually highlighting the grotesque moral costs of that era is a bizarre way to advertise it.... The most favorable interpretation of Biden’s bipartisanship nostalgia is that he knows he’s peddling baloney, but he’s doing it because people like it...."

From "Joe Biden’s Segregationist Nostalgia Is Even More Ignorant Than It Sounds" by Jonathan Chait (in NY Magazine).

It's inconvenient to Democrats for Biden to remind us of their deplorable historical record. Maybe some of the younger people hadn't noticed that the Democratic Party was the one with all the segregationists.

Biden's an old man, and maybe he's too old to do the onerous job of President, but he does have the advantage of remembering a longer stretch of history. Today, he's being savaged for remembering it with some fondness. Those were the bad old days, say the people who didn't live through them, who demand that the badness be forefronted and beaten into our head continually.

We've already got Trump saying "Make America Great Again." It's weird for Biden to pick up that theme, especially when he's finding the greatness so close to actual, vicious racism. Trump never said Nazis were "very fine people." But he said something somewhere in the vicinity of that and his antagonists made sure it got remembered that way. And now here comes Biden, not saying segregationists were very fine people, but saying something close enough to that to give his antagonists a way to drive it into our head that that he did indeed say that.

Poor Biden! But you've got to be smart and wily to win the presidency, and he needs to be put to the test. He's going to fail, isn't he?