A Year After a Fiery Voting Rights Speech, Biden Delivers a More Muted Address
On Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, the president assured an audience at Ebenezer Baptist Church that its side in the struggle would, indeed, overcome someday. Just not anytime soon.
ATLANTA — When he came to the capital of the South to honor the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. last year, President Biden delivered a call to nonviolent arms to fight for voting rights, equating opponents to segregationists and vowing to rewrite Senate rules to defeat them. “I will not yield,” he declared. “I will not flinch.”
A year later, Mr. Biden returned to Atlanta on Sunday with little to show for it. He may not have flinched, but he did not succeed, either. None of the sweeping voting rights measures he championed passed the Democratic-controlled Congress last year, and the prospects of any passing a newly elected Republican-controlled House seem vanishingly small.
And so a leader who arguably owes his presidency to the critical and timely support of Black voters in 2020 was left to offer only vague exhortations of hope and no concrete policy plans or legislative strategies. He assured an audience at Dr. King’s fabled Ebenezer Baptist Church that its side in the struggle would, indeed, overcome someday. Just not anytime soon.
“At this inflection point, we know there’s a lot of work that has to continue on economic justice, civil rights, voting rights and protecting our democracy, and I’m remembering that our job is to redeem the soul of America,” Mr. Biden told the appreciative crowd, which included Dr. King’s sister, Christine King Farris, and one of his allies, Andrew Young.
“Look, I get accused of being an inveterate optimist,” the president added. “Progress is never easy. But redeeming the soul of the country is absolutely essential.”
Speaking from a church pulpit, Mr. Biden eschewed the open partisanship of his speech last year, when he spoke at a university and compared Republicans to George Wallace, the Alabama governor who stood in a doorway rather than let Black students enter a white university; Bull Connor, the public safety commissioner of Birmingham, Ala., who unleashed police dogs and fire hoses on civil rights protesters; and Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy that went to war to defend slavery.
The analogy went over poorly at the time with Republicans, who insisted that the limits they had imposed in many states were intended to secure election integrity and argued that they opposed Democratic-sponsored legislation because it was federal overreach. Even some Democrats fretted that the president “went a little too far in his rhetoric,” as one senator put it last year. Mr. Biden defended the comparison then but opted against repeating it or anything like it on Sunday.