ANYONE WHO OPPOSES OBAMA IS RACIST. SO YES. Jonathan Chait: Are Biden-for-President Supporters All Sexist?

One of the unfortunate habits overtaking the left is a tendency to conclude that any behavior that could plausibly be motivated by bigotry is likely motivated by bigotry. It is no doubt true that a misogynist would want Joe Biden to challenge Hillary Clinton. Therefore, Scott Lemieux concludes, people who want Biden to challenge Clinton are sexist.

I don’t have any particular brief for Biden — it seems way too late for him to run, I think he has serious message-discipline problems that limit him as a candidate, and I’d probably vote for Clinton if he did run. What makes Lemieux’s column worth examining is not its conclusion but its reasoning.

Well, with a Lemieux column, that’s a . . . charitable term. But:

Lemieux points out that Biden and Clinton have similar ideological profiles (which places the enthusiasm for Biden in a more suspect category than support for the left-wing Bernie Sanders). He insists that Biden is no more likely to win than Clinton. (“Clinton has consistently been a more popular political figure than Biden.”) Therefore, there’s only one possible reason anybody would want him to run.

This is how they think. And when I say “think,” I’m being . . . charitable.