MICHAEL BARONE: Joe Biden’s Big Lie.
Did you know that black people are not going to be allowed to vote in America anymore? At least in states controlled by Republicans. Sounds a bit unlikely, but that’s a conclusion you might have come to if you took seriously what President Joe Biden was saying in Philadelphia Tuesday.
Biden decried Republicans’ proposed changes in election laws as “the 21st-century Jim Crow assault” that tries “to suppress and subvert the right to vote in fair and free elections, an assault on democracy.”
This is, to be polite, unhinged nonsense.
Biden is old enough to remember what real Jim Crow voter suppression was like. It meant zero black people voting in places such as Mississippi. It meant threats and violence against black people who tried to register to vote. It meant the unfair application of literacy tests and poll taxes.
Requiring voters to present picture ID is nothing like this: Large majorities think it’s reasonable. Measures such as reducing the number of pre-election voting days in Georgia (there are zero in Biden’s Delaware) or ending pandemic-inspired measures such as drive-thru voting in Harris County, Texas, are not the same. Not even close.
Early in his speech, Biden denounced “the Big Lie,” a reference to Donald Trump’s claims that he actually won the 2020 election. But Biden’s Jim Crow charge is an even clearer instance of the Big Lie — and a more dangerous one since it’s unlikely to be fact-checked by most media. If you want people to condemn a Big Lie, don’t tell one yourself.
In his criticism of Trump, Biden invoked a long-standing norm of American politics. “In America, if you lose, you accept the results. You follow the Constitution. You try again. You don’t call the facts ‘fake’ and then try to bring down the American experiment just because you’re unhappy.”
He spoke these words, apparently unaware that they could be applied to him and his own party.
To be fair, Biden’s unaware of most everything these days. And the people who write his speeches for him don’t care.