Several Democratic presidential candidates sharply criticized Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Wednesday for invoking two Southern segregationist senators by name as he defended himself over accusations of being "old-fashioned" and fondly recalled the "civility" of the Senate in the 1970s and 1980s.
Mr. Biden, speaking at a fund-raiser at the Carlyle Hotel in New York City on Tuesday night, stressed the need to "be able to reach consensus under our system," and cast his decades in the Senate as a time of relative comity. His remarks come as some in his party say that Mr. Biden, the former vice president, is too focused on overtures to the right as he seeks the Democratic presidential nomination.
At the event, Mr. Biden noted that he served with the late Senators James O. Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia, both Democrats who were staunch opponents of desegregation. Mr. Eastland was the powerful chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee when Mr. Biden entered the chamber in 1973.
"I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland," said Mr. Biden, 76, slipping briefly into a Southern accent, according to a pool report from the fund-raiser. "He never called me 'boy,' he always called me 'son.'"
He called Mr. Talmadge "one of the meanest guys I ever knew, you go down the list of all these guys."
"Well guess what?" Mr. Biden continued. "At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn't agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished. But today you look at the other side and you're the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy. We don't talk to each other anymore."
On Wednesday, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, one of two black candidates running for president, said Mr. Biden was "wrong" to use segregationists as examples for bringing the country together.
"You don't joke about calling black men 'boys,'" Mr. Booker said in a statement. "I'm disappointed that he hasn't issued an immediate apology for the pain his words are dredging up for many Americans. He should." Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont later echoed Mr. Booker's call for an apology.
Mr. Eastland, a plantation owner, was known as a vociferous opponent of integration efforts and a staunch critic of the civil rights movement, which he sometimes dismissed as the work of "communists." Throughout his career he referred to African-Americans as members of an "inferior race" and used the racist term "mongrelization."
Mr. Talmadge was also a critic of the civil rights movement and opposed the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, that declared racially segregated public schools unconstitutional.
