Biden lends voice to race issue in plot to oust Trump

Most of the aspiring leaders of the Democratic Party have apparently concluded that branding the president a “racist” and “white supremacist” is the strategy to pursue to win the nomination and the White House.

Here is Joe Biden, speaking in Iowa as President Donald Trump was visiting the wounded communities of Dayton and El Paso: “This president has fanned the flames of white supremacy in this nation. ... The energetic embrace of this president by the darkest hearts and the most hate-filled minds in this country says it all.

“We have a problem with this rising tide of ... white supremacy in America. And we have a president who encourages and emboldens it.”

The key piece of evidence linking Trump to the mass murderer of El Paso is a single phrase out of a 2,000-word screed posted on social media, allegedly by the gunman minutes before carrying out his atrocity.

Patrick Crusius said he was striking this blow against the “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” And Donald Trump has often used that term, invasion, to describe the crisis on the border.

Yet the word “invasion” to label what is happening on America’s Southern border long predated Trump, and, moreover, is both an accurate and valid description.

There are, by most estimates, at least 11 million migrants in the United States illegally, the equivalent of the entire population of Cuba. Lately, migrants have been crossing the Mexican border at a rate of 100,000 a month. If one had to choose a word to describe graphically what is going on, would it not be invasion?

What a panicked establishment, and its stable of candidates, is doing is transparent. By declaring “invasion” to be inherently racist, it is conceding the word has power and is an effective weapon in the political arsenal of those the establishment seeks to stigmatize and silence.

Trump’s adversaries want to stop him from using his most powerful and compelling arguments and images, the ones that enabled him to win the presidency. The left is now using “white supremacy” as its new hate term, because “racist” has all but lost its sting.

But Biden’s raising of the race issue is going to come back and bite him.

Said Joe in Iowa: “Our president has more in common with George Wallace than George Washington.”

Are American voters supposed to respond warmly to this?

Biden’s words in Iowa — “We have a president who has aligned himself with the darkest forces in this nation” — appear to be a lift from Robert Kennedy’s attack on LBJ when Bobby announced for president just days after Lyndon Johnson was badly wounded in the 1968 New Hampshire primary.

Said Bobby of the father of the Civil Right Act of 1964: “Our national leadership is calling upon the darker impulses of the American spirit.”

LBJ and his associates, Bobby went on, “have removed themselves from the American tradition, from the enduring and generous impulses that are the soul of this nation.”

“We are fighting for the soul of America,” echoed Biden in Iowa.

In George Wallace’s saldas, Joe sang a different tune, telling the Philadelphia Inquirer on Oct. 12, 1975: “I think the Democratic Party could stand a liberal George Wallace — someone who’s not afraid to stand up and offend people, someone who would say what the American people know is right.”

Perhaps Joe can become such a fearless leader in 2020.