Biden shouldn’t have commented on Chauvin, but he could

With the jury deliberating in the Derek Chauvin murder trial, President Biden made a highly unusual statement Tuesday by letting everyone know what he thinks the verdict ought to be.

“I’m praying the verdict is the right verdict, which I think it’s overwhelming in my view,” he told reporters on Tuesday.

This clearly indicated Biden believed Chauvin should be found guilty of killing George Floyd. His spokesperson later tried to argue, rather absurdly, that “I don’t think he would see it as weighing in on the verdict,” and that he was merely expressing compassion for Floyd’s family.

Biden’s comment was a mistake. Even if you agree with his assessment, it’s inappropriate for the president to weigh in on a criminal trial in that way before the verdict has come down. He could easily have said “I have my opinion, but it wouldn’t be proper for me to force my way into this debate before the trial is over.”

But Biden has seldom been one to keep his mouth shut, so here we are. And now, something interesting will happen — particularly in light of what we watched for eight years when Biden was vice president.

In coming days, you’re likely to hear plenty of people take the same position, that Biden probably shouldn’t have said anything. You may even hear a few intense voices on the right suggest Biden was encouraging violence had Chauvin escaped conviction, with some trying to make this stick as an emblem of Biden’s permissiveness toward allegedly violent protesters of police brutality.

But what you won’t see is this comment living on for years, becoming Exhibit A in the GOP indictment of Joe Biden’s presidency.

Now try to imagine if it were Barack Obama saying the same thing. The reaction from Republicans would have been positively thermonuclear.

That’s because as hard as Obama worked to make himself into the Black politician white people would feel comfortable with, it was never enough for the race-baiters of the right, always ready to tell their base that despite all appearances, Obama was out to wreak vengeance upon white people.

“You start getting some sense of who he is, and it’s not the Obama you thought. He’s not the Tiger Woods of politics,” said legendary GOP consultant Alex Castellanos, who created the infamously racist “White Hands” ad for Sen. Jesse Helms, in early 2008.

That was always the formula, to convince Republican voters that the dastardly Obama just wouldn’t let them forget he was Black — and they kept pressing it for eight years. Obama “always brings race into it,” Republican voters were often heard to say — when the truth was that no president has ever worked so hard to avoid talking about race.

Even the mildest of comments from Obama simply acknowledging that he was, in fact, a Black person were met with furious condemnation, such as his comment after the murder of 17-yearold Trayvon Martin that “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” Simply for communicating why that killing had special resonance for Black parents, Obama was roundly condemned.

Or recall when Obama said that police “acted stupidly” when they arrested the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor of Harvard University for trying to break in to his own house. The controversy was so overwhelming that Obama felt compelled to share a beer with the officer at the White House to show his commitment to the cause of not offending white people.

Those transgressions were brought up by Republicans for years to show that Obama was an instigator of racial strife. But this will not be Biden’s fate. Three years from now, Republican media figures won’t still bring up that time he said that Derek Chauvin being convicted would be “the right verdict.”

This is Biden’s gift — we might even call it “privilege.” It’s not just that he can get away with things that Obama couldn’t. It’s also that, by virtue of being an older white man who made a career out of speaking for the sentiments and anxieties of the white working class, he gets to go where others might not be permitted without it becoming an allconsuming controversy.

On one hand, it feels like a momentary relief, to be able even to say that Biden stepped a bit out of line without worrying that his doing so will overshadow the importance of the case itself — and the appropriate anger so many would have felt if, like so many officers before him, Chauvin had wound up not receiving the appropriate accountability.

But it’s also another disheartening reminder of the underlying unfairness, even sickness, that made Biden’s presidency so necessary. Even after the whirlwind of destruction that was Donald Trump, Democrats had to find the candidate least threatening to white people and to men if they were to take back the White House. You can be glad they did, but still ache at what it says about our politics.