Joe Biden panders to Al Sharpton

Only in America can a poor black child dream of growing up to have a president pander to him at the National Action Network annual convention. That's what happened Wednesday when Joe Biden spoke remotely to Al Sharpton' National Action Network. Joe Biden was in full-blown pander mode Wednesday. At one point, Biden said "parts of our country are backsliding. The days of Jim Crow, passing laws that harken back to the era of poll taxes, when Black people were made to guess how many beans – how many jelly beans in a jar, or count the number of bubbles in a bar of soap before they could cast their ballot." The new Georgia law doesn't restart Jim Crow-style segregation. It simply requires that Georgians voting via absentee ballot write in the voter's driver's license number or Georgia state ID number. This is already required for voting on the day of election. Here's Joe Biden's videotaped message to the National Action Network: Democrats don't talk policy except on a superficial level. Instead, they pander as they play the identity politics card repeatedly. Bill Steigerwald's article rips the Jim Crow theory to shreds:

Joe Biden thinks Georgia's new voting integrity law is "Jim Crow on steroids." Stacey Abrams says the voting law changes are "a redux of Jim Crow in a suit and tie." And now House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn has added his partisan hyperbole to the fight, telling Jake Tapper at CNN that yes, he sees Georgia’s new law as "the new Jim Crow." With all due respect, Clyburn needs glasses as badly as Biden needs a history book. As for the ambitious Abrams, she’s said to be testing whether the "new Jim Crow" claim is a campaign theme she can exploit to become governor of Georgia. But sorry. What the Republicans running the Peach State are allegedly doing to "suppress" has little in common with the "old Jim Crow." Requiring an ID for absentee voters is not voter repression or intimidation. Neither is preventing campaign operatives from giving water or other snacks to voters waiting in line at polling places or asking early voters to get their votes in earlier so they can be counted by Election Day.

This is a brief lesson on life under real Jim Crow laws:

In 1890, in spite of its 16 black members, the Louisiana General Assembly passed a law to prevent black and white people from riding together on railroads. Plessy v. Ferguson, a case challenging the law, reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896. Upholding the law, the court said that public facilities for blacks and whites could be “separate but equal.” Soon, throughout the South, they had to be separate. Two years later, the court seemed to seal the fate of black Americans when it upheld a Mississippi law designed to deny black men the vote. Given the green light, Southern states began to limit the voting right to those who owned property or could read well, to those whose grandfathers had been able to vote, to those with “good characters,” to those who paid poll taxes. In 1896, Louisiana had 130,334 registered black voters. Eight years later, only 1,342, 1 percent, could pass the state’s new rules. Jim Crow laws touched every part of life. In South Carolina, black and white textile workers could not work in the same room, enter through the same door, or gaze out of the same window. Many industries wouldn’t hire blacks: Many unions passed rules to exclude them.

Joe Biden is intentionally lying. FDR famously said that "all we have to fear is fear itself." Today's Democrats can only offer fear itself. Democrats don't have productive ideas. Instead, they have a counterproductive agenda.