Biden deserves an apology from Sanders for falsehood

While the news media has been focused on the “spat” between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, something much more serious has been taking place between the Sanders campaign and Joe Biden. The Sanders campaign has flat-out lied about things Biden said in 2018 about Social Security, and it has refused to admit the falsehood.

This is bad, almost Trumpian. The last thing we need is another president who demonizes and lies about anyone who disagrees with him, and can’t admit ever being wrong. Biden deserves an apology, now.

That said it would be good to have Biden explain why, in the more distant past, he went along with the Beltway consensus that Social Security needed to be pared back.

In 2018, Biden gave a speech attacking Paul Ryan, the thenspeaker of the House, for wanting to cut taxes on the rich and pay for those tax cuts by cutting Social Security and Medicare. There was nothing in his remarks that should bother progressives.

However, a Sanders adviser recently circulated a snippet from the video of the event that made it appear that Biden was actually supporting Ryan’s position and calling for Social Security cuts. A few days later a newsletter from the Sanders campaign quoted Biden out of context and made the same claim.

If you want a parallel, it’s as if I were to say, “Some white nationalists claim that Jews are responsible for all our problems,” and a political campaign put out a release saying, “Krugman says ‘Jews are responsible for all our problems.’ ”

Biden did make a misstep in his counterattack, mislabeling the misrepresented video clip as “doctored,” but that doesn’t mean he’s not still due an abject apology. Instead, however, the Sanders campaign has doubled down. Rather than admitting that it smeared a rival, the campaign is claiming that Biden has a long record of trying to cut Social Security. There is, unfortunately, some truth in that claim — but it doesn’t excuse either the original lie or the refusal to admit error.

So, about the element of truth in the criticism of Biden: Once upon a time, there was a peculiar consensus among media figures and would-be centrists that the long-run cost of entitlement programs was America’s biggest problem, that Social Security in particular was in crisis and that something had to be done, with the solution including benefit cuts.

This consensus wasn’t based on hard thinking; it was about the attitude politicians were expected to display. As I wrote way back in 2007, proclaiming a Social Security crisis requiring cuts was seen as a “badge of seriousness,” a way of showing how statesmanlike and tough-minded you were.

The candidate I was criticizing, by the way — the guy I said had been “played for a sucker” — was a politician named Barack Obama. But Biden was certainly pulled in by that conventional wisdom, too, so it’s not hard to find old quotes in which he suggested possible Social Security cuts in the name of fiscal responsibility.

These days, Biden, like many Democrats, is calling for an expansion of Social Security benefits. That doesn’t make his previous statements irrelevant; he should acknowledge that he has changed his position, and his history on the issue is one reason progressives worry that, if elected, he might fritter away his political capital in vain attempts to reach bipartisan compromise.

But right now, Sanders and his campaign are behaving badly, and they need to be called on it.