I’m imagining him delivering his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention next year. “And now I’d like to say a few words to black Americans, without whom this moment wouldn’t have been possible. Homies…”

Are any progressives pretending to be outraged about this? Republicans might be outraged knowing how it would have been received had, say, George Bush or Mitt Romney used the same phrasing. (Never mind Trump.) The problem for anti-Biden lefties in wanting to feign upset about it, though, is the same problem they ran into last night with the 2015 clip of Biden praising Dick Cheney: It’s old. It’s been out there for years. The clip above is new, sure, but he’s been telling this same story with the same terminology since he was in office. Here he is as vice president in 2014 telling the Chamber of Commerce about residents of “the hood” in Detroit. He told the same story to the Brookings Institution last year and was dinged for it by the RNC, among others.

Even if they’re inclined to punish him for it, how can they pretend to be surprised that the guy who once famously described Obama as “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy” might be prone to referring to working-class blacks as being from “the hood”? This is who he is, and who he’s been for decades. And leftists couldn’t have cared less so long as he working for them rather than against him.

Here’s a fun one that I hadn’t heard before from all the way back in 1975, though, retrieved from the mists of time by the Examiner:

“I still walk down the street in the black side of town,” he told the Washington Post in 1975. “Mousey and Chops and all the boys at 13th, and — I can walk in those pool halls, and quite frankly don’t know another white man involved in Delaware politics who can do that kind of thing.”

Some intrepid reporter in Delaware should try to track down “Mousey” and “Chops” and “the boys at 13th” and see how they’re feeling about a President Biden. Who knows? Maybe they’ll stumble across T-Bone in the process.

Don’t miss the forest for the trees in Biden’s story, though. The chatterati is snickering over his use of the term “the hood” but the story he’s telling is about not taking the abilities of blue-collar people in the Rust Belt, black or white, for granted. They went to work, learned to code, and helped bring Detroit back to life. He’s going to take that message around the region next year and claim that the same can happen for every deindustrialized part of the midwest. That’s the message most voters will hear when listening to this story, I think, not a politically incorrect quirk in Biden’s terminology.

Via the Free Beacon, here’s another example of him using language that’s forbidden to Republicans.