Or is it Harris, Booker, and the others who are seizing an opportunity to pretend they don't get it and lambaste the front runner though he doesn't deserve it and they know perfectly well he doesn't?
They haven't put a dent in his lead and, desperate, they are trying to paint him as a racist, as one who too much tolerates racism, or just a doddering old fool well past his use-by date.
And, really, De Blasio gets to decide what is acceptable in the Democratic Party?
De blasio?
Joe Biden and Democratic Rivals Exchange Attacks Over His Remarks on Segregationists
Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Wednesday lashed out at his Democratic rivals who had condemned his fond recollections of working relationships with segregationists in the Senate, declining to apologize and defending his record on civil rights.
The angry exchange shattered, at least for now, the relative comity that had marked the Democratic presidential primary.
Until Wednesday, many of the Democratic candidates had largely taken oblique swipes at Mr. Biden, while the former vice president sought to stay above the fray, training his sights on President Trump instead.
But a day after he invoked the 1970s, an era when he said he could find common ground with other senators — even virulent segregationists — his opponents offered their sharpest criticism yet.
Senator Kamala Harris of California said the former vice president “doesn’t understand the history of our country and the dark history of our country,” and Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey said Mr. Biden should immediately apologize for using segregationists to make a point about civility in the Senate.
Ms. Harris and Mr. Booker, who are both black, were not alone: Other candidates including Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont also weighed in with criticism.
And even some of Mr. Biden’s senior campaign advisers were privately shaken by his remarks.
Yet for much of the day, Mr. Biden and his campaign appeared publicly unbowed and intent on defending, or at least explaining, his worldview of politics, which is rooted in his early days in the Senate when, he said, legislators who disagreed still worked together.
He cited two defenders of segregation, Senators James O. Eastland of Mississippi and Herman E. Talmadge of Georgia, to make that point.
“Apologize for what?” he said Wednesday evening before appearing at a fund-raiser in Maryland, adding that he “could not have disagreed with Jim Eastland more.”
Asked by reporters about Mr. Booker’s demand that he apologize for his remarks, Mr. Biden said: “Cory should apologize. He knows better. There’s not a racist bone in my body. I’ve been involved in civil rights my whole career, period, period, period.”
Biden, Recalling ‘Civility’ in Senate, Invokes Two Segregationist Senators
Mr. Biden, speaking at a fund-raiser at the Carlyle Hotel in New York City on Tuesday night, stressed the need to “be able to reach consensus under our system,” and cast his decades in the Senate as a time of relative comity.
His remarks come as some in his party say that Mr. Biden, the former vice president, is too focused on overtures to the right as he seeks the Democratic presidential nomination.
On the whole, but not entirely, they are right and he is wrong about that.
Today's Republicans, today's conservatives, today's white racists are not out to preserve a regime, as those guys were back in the day, but to tear one apart.
It makes a difference that he seems blind to.
But any attempt to paint B as a racist or as soft on racism or racists is crap.
At the event, Mr. Biden noted that he served with the late Senators James O. Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia, both Democrats who were staunch opponents of desegregation.
Mr. Eastland was the powerful chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee when Mr. Biden entered the chamber in 1973.
“I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,” said Mr. Biden, 76, slipping briefly into a Southern accent, according to a pool report from the fund-raiser.
“He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son.’”
He called Mr. Talmadge “one of the meanest guys I ever knew, you go down the list of all these guys.”
“Well guess what?” Mr. Biden continued.
“At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished.
"But today you look at the other side and you’re the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy. We don’t talk to each other anymore.”
But he is not entirely wrong.
Think of budgets, the debt ceiling, and a multitude of other things that cannot get passed, even now, without a degree of cooperation across the aisle.
And nobody is going to do any sort of deal on immigration without cooperation.
On Wednesday, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, one of two black candidates running for president, said Mr. Biden was “wrong” to use segregationists as examples for bringing the country together.
. . . .
Senator Kamala Harris of California, who is also black, said she found Mr. Biden’s comments concerning.
“If those men had their way, I wouldn’t be in the United States Senate and on this elevator right now,” she said, referring to Mr. Eastland and Mr. Talmadge, according to ABC News.
Other presidential candidates weighed in as well. Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York posted a photo of his multiracial family on Twitter and cited a racial epithet that Mr. Eastland used.
“It’s 2019 & @JoeBiden is longing for the good old days of ‘civility’ typified by James Eastland,” Mr. de Blasio wrote.
“It’s past time for apologies or evolution from @JoeBiden. He repeatedly demonstrates that he is out of step with the values of the modern Democratic Party.”
De Blasio, especially, is way, way out of line.
The truth is that none of them is radical enough about methods, about killing the filibuster, about packing the court, to even stave off disaster (the GOP Supremes will do all the harm to the progressive state - the welfare state, the regulatory state, Social Security, etc. - that they dare and can, once the threat and maybe reality of a Dem presidency are past), let alone enable progress with anything remotely resembling the AOC/Bernie or Warren agenda.
They are not willing to do what they have to do to enable them to be a whit more effective than Joe would be.
It's all just posing, posturing, and bullshit if you haven't got the balls to do what has to be done.
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