Joe Biden Will Create ‘Position That Reaches Out to Conservatives’

Joe Biden plans to create a “position that reaches out to conservatives,” according to Cedric Richmond, whom the former Vice President has tapped to lead the White House Office of Public Engagement.

Bloomberg News reported earlier this week:

He said the office’s goal was to forge connections with all Americans, regardless of their political affiliation. “We’re not elected just to help Democrats or urban cities or minorities,” he said. “We were elected to help this entire country and that means reaching out to conservatives, that means reaching out to rural areas, reaching out to people who didn’t vote for us.”

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Part of Richmond’s mandate is to help the incoming Biden administration’s relations with Republicans in Congress. He said he would work to “create a demand in the country to make politicians work across the aisle and to work together.”

Richmond, who chaired the Congressional Black Caucus at the time, infamously declined a meeting with President Donald Trump and members of the caucus in 2017. He also said Trump was not a “legitimate” president, said Trump was “absolutely” a racist, and claimed Trump did not care about black people.

It is not clear whom, or what, Richmond would define as “conservative.” He said Biden would use “infrastructure” spending to reach out to conservatives — likely meaning earmarks, provisions inserted by members of Congress in unrelated bills to support projects in their states and districts. The practice was widely abused and was denounced by conservatives as a form of corruption before it was eliminated by the newly-elected Republican House of Representatives in 2011.

The Biden campaign advocated for limits on conservative free speech throughout the 2020 presidential campaign. Biden pushed social media companies to crack down on conservatives, and appointed anti-free speech Richard Stengel to his transition team.

The Biden campaign also smeared conservative media throughout the 2020 presidential campaign, targeting Breitbart News among others. In August 2019, the campaign referred to this reporter as “one of Trump’s Breitbart lackeys” after I confronted the candidate about his repeated misquoting of President Donald Trump’s remarks about the Charlottesville riots in 2017.

President Barack Obama also made perfunctory efforts to reach out to conservatives — at least those in the Beltway. In February 2009, Obama dined with several conservatives — almost all of whom went on to become Never Trumpers:

The president-elect arrived at the Chevy Chase, Md., home of syndicated columnist George Will shortly after 6:30 p.m., according to a press pool report. Greeting him at the residence were other luminaries of the conservative commentariat, including the Weekly Standard’s William Kristol, New York Times columnist David Brooks, and Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post.

Obama went on to govern as one of the more divisive presidents in recent history.

Richmond added that he would create a “conduit straight into the White House” for Wall Street CEOs, perhaps confusing them with conservatives.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.