David A. Graham: The contradiction at the heart of Biden’s campaign

Recriminations came quickly. The Washington Post reported that staffers had pleaded with Biden not to talk about Eastland. Other Democratic presidential hopefuls criticized Biden, led by Senator Cory Booker, who said he should apologize. Biden fired back, saying that Booker “knows better. There’s not a racist bone in my body,” and saying Booker was the one who should apologize. (He did not.)

There are several ways to read Biden’s response. One is that Biden’s temper got the better of him, as it has, to his detriment, in past presidential races. Another, more cynical view is that Biden is acting quite deliberately—calculating that he’s strong enough among black voters and core Democrats to withstand the controversy, and that refusing to back down will play well with white voters who might go for either Trump or Biden.

When I have pointed out the dissonances of Biden running on a nostalgia ticket, a common response has been, So what? He’s way out in front of the Democratic field, so clearly it’s working. Yet his invocation of Eastland is a concrete demonstration of the risks of the nostalgia campaign. Biden’s coalition fuses together support from African Americans and from older white voters, and his supporters remember the past in two different, perhaps mutually incompatible, ways.

Any time you start waxing nostalgic, someone’s going to ask which golden era you’re recalling—and someone’s going to have a good reason why that era wasn’t as golden as you say. Older white voters who don’t like either the crassness of Trump or the combative liberalism of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may indeed look fondly on the late 1970s and early 1980s as halcyon days. But black voters are unlikely to look quite so fondly on mentions of Eastland—or on the other examples of Biden praising Dixiecrats that have resurfaced in the past couple days.

David A. Graham: One big difference between Biden and every other recent Democratic nominee

Biden could have made the same point in a less inflammatory way by citing more recent examples of working with Republicans to pass bipartisan bills. Perhaps he simply resorted to the shopworn Eastland anecdote because it’s familiar and comfortable. Perhaps he really believes it’s the best illustration of how compromise works.

But compromise in the service of what? Biden’s anecdote is a tactic in search of a strategy. While his rivals offer vast reimaginings of the political landscape, Biden has centered his campaign on opposing Trump. Yet it’s hard to see how even the relatively modest proposals Biden offers fit into this paradigm. Biden wants to address climate change, make it easier to vote, reform campaign finance, and improve labor protections. All of these are anathema to the current Republican Party, and without a unifying common cause—like defeating the Soviet Union, for example—it’s not clear what compromise Biden could offer to entice GOP politicians to work with him.