Opinion | What Biden's eulogy for Strom Thurmond says about
Forgive me if my memories of summer 2003 are hazy. Our fourth child had just been born, and the oldest was only 5. We believed in family planning, but, as poet Robert Burns noted in his rustic dialect: “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.” Our schemes were wonderfully — but exhaustingly — agley.
So I have only a general memory of being sent that July to cover the funeral in Columbia, S.C., of Strom Thurmond, the centenarian U.S. senator whose labors in defense of racial segregation made him a key figure of 20th-century history, even as his lechery made him notorious for sexual harassment in the Capitol (at a time when that really took some doing). If Thurmond got into heaven that day, the Almighty grades on a very generous curve. Which I, for one, hope that He does.
What I recall with crystalline clarity is that Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware was Thurmond’s hand-picked eulogist. “I think this is his last laugh,” Biden said of the seemingly incongruous assignment, “for what else could explain a Northeast liberal’s presence here?” The braying white supremacist who tried to sink Harry S. Truman in 1948 because Truman embraced desegregation ... the racist who signed the Southern manifesto against civil rights and delivered a record filibuster against a modest measure of justice ... the politician who personified the regional realignment of parties over race in America ... the man who hid his parentage of a mixed-race child for decades ... this man chose Joe Biden to speak over his casket.
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Accepting that call was not the most important thing Biden ever did. But it is among the most illuminating. In traveling to Columbia, and in the words he chose for the task, the would-be president revealed what matters most to him in public life.
Biden is an institutionalist. The Senate and its traditions, its culture, are important to him. In that sense, there is a conservative streak to his liberal politics, because true conservatives value the role of institutions in moderating change. It showed in a story Biden told, not about Thurmond but about another old foe of civil rights: Mississippi’s Sen. John Stennis, whose office space Biden inherited when Stennis finally reached the end of his long, unfortunate tenure.
Those who love the Senate care deeply about the genealogy of office space; the place is thick with ghosts. In Biden’s telling, the peaceful transfer of the Stennis domain was a kind of lesser Appomattox, a surrender without humiliation, a sign that Americans who fight, no matter how bitterly, can bind one another’s wounds when the fighting is over. Senate real estate becomes a totem for that which holds us together.
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Biden also disclosed his preference for persons over principles. Not that Biden has no principles. But he is loath to let his principles get in the way of personal connections. No amount of historical baggage was going to keep him from forming a bond with a colleague — and in Biden’s telling, Thurmond repaid that bond by standing with Biden through an episode of political peril.
Also on display in the pulpit of First Baptist Church that day was Biden’s view of politics as a two-way street, a marketplace of needs and favors in which participants can all benefit from the free exchange of chits. Except on Election Day, Biden is a “win-win” kind of guy. The “Northeast liberal” fully understood that his eulogy was a Thurmond power play from beyond the grave; the old coot turned to Biden for a fresh coat of paint on the historical record. But Biden benefited, too, from his prominent appearance as a national healer. There was something in it for them both.
A short step took Biden from Columbia to his co-starring role in Barack Obama’s “audacity of hope” campaign five years later. And now Biden’s own presidential bid plays similar notes. No matter how deeply divided we are, he suggests, we can be friends and do business together in the context of our national institutions. Given one more transfer of office space, this time in the West Wing, bygones will become bygones.
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But can it be so? If he wins when the ballots are counted, Biden will need partners to restore the institutions that, during the Trump years, have been known as The Swamp. Where is he to find them? The political energy of recent years has come largely from ideologues — populists and rampart stormers — not the types to forgive and forget.
“Our differences were profound,” Biden allowed of Thurmond that day, “but I came to understand that, as Archibald MacLeish wrote: ‘It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived: Life is lived for better or worse in life.’ ” In this age of ideologies, that teaching is sorely tested.
Read more from David Von Drehle’s archive.
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Matt Bai: Joe Biden, the inspirational plodder
Michal McFaul: The Joe Biden most Americans don’t get to see
Micahel Gerson: A conservative’s case for Biden
The Post’s View: Joe Biden for president
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