“I literally leaned back in my couch and couldn’t believe that one moment,” he told CNN. “I think that anybody that knows our painful history knows that on voting rights, on civil rights, on the protections from hate crimes, African Americans and many other groups in this country have had to turn to the federal government to intervene because there were states that were violating those rights.”

That history is painful and important. Many Americans still underestimate the ongoing need for federal protection of civil rights against state and local governments.

But wait a minute.

Hearing Booker, you might think that Biden has opposed federal interventions to protect voting rights, civil rights, and victims of hate crimes. In fact, Biden has long supported an expansive federal role in all three areas and voted in 2001 to add sexual orientation to the protected categories in federal hate-crime law. There’s a lot about Biden’s record to dislike. Booker remarked on an area where he’s—by liberal Democrat standards—strong.

Listening to Harris, you might think that she, unlike Biden, favors federally mandated busing as a tool to reduce segregation. “Does Harris support busing for school integration right now?” the New York Times reporter Astead W. Herndon asked Ian Sams, her campaign manager, on June 27. “Yes,” he replied.

But Harris later clarified that she does not favor federally mandated busing right now. Rather, she thinks that some school districts should consider it on a voluntary basis, and that for the most part busing is no longer necessary in America.

“It sounds here like @KamalaHarris is now taking something more like the @JoeBiden position on school busing,” said David Axelrod, a political adviser in the Obama administration. “So what was that whole thing at the debate all about?”

It wasn’t about Biden’s electability or what a President Biden would do in 2021 about busing or other federal interventions to protect civil rights (or even what he did from 2009 to 2016).

Harris and Biden disagree on whether federally mandated busing was a sound policy almost 50 years ago. They have no similar difference on federal civil-rights policy today. Would Harris necessarily be better on matters of federal civil rights than Biden? At the very least, her record as a prosecutor makes that an open question.

I don’t mean to rule out the past. Biden’s vote in favor of the Iraq War ought to count against him––but that’s in part because it is relevant to what he might do if urged to launch a future war of choice against a foreign adversary. It makes no sense for Democrats to focus so intensely on busing, an issue with these characteristics: