Joseph R. Biden Jr. was addressing an elite audience, describing how as a young senator he had learned to work with Jesse Helms, the right-wing North Carolinian known for his fierce opposition to civil rights and his open loathing of gay people. He once believed Mr. Helms had “no redeeming social value,” Mr. Biden said, until a senior Democratic senator chided him, explaining that Mr. Helms and his wife had adopted a disabled teenager.
It was a moment of revelation, Mr. Biden said.
“It’s awful hard having to reach across the table and shake hands,” he said. “No matter how bitterly you disagree, though, it is always possible if you question judgment and not motive.”
The audience was Yale University’s graduating class of 2015. Mr. Biden delivered the speech as the sitting vice president of the United States. His remarks on Mr. Helms, who died in 2008, stirred not a hint of controversy.
As Mr. Biden seeks the White House four years later, his reminiscences about working with hard-line reactionaries — including segregationists like James O. Eastland and Herman Talmadge — have provoked an entirely different response. His evident nostalgia for forging compromises, even with racist figures like them, touched off a disruptive new controversy for his campaign, as liberal leaders and Democratic rivals accused him of being insensitive and out of touch.
The criticism has deeply angered Mr. Biden, according to associates, and he is said to be indignant over what he sees as politically motivated hectoring from rival presidential candidates. His reaction has crackled with the frustration of a man who feels he is being misunderstood and caricatured. Asked by a reporter about Senator Cory Booker’s demand that he apologize, Mr. Biden shot back: “Apologize for what?”
“He knows better,” Mr. Biden said of Mr. Booker. “I don’t have a racist bone in my body.”
[Read more about Mr. Biden’s call to Mr. Booker.]
In other words, Mr. Biden seemed to insist, he has not changed — he remains the same man who left office in 2017 as a beloved figure among Democrats, and a friend to lawmakers like Mr. Booker.
Yet if Mr. Biden remains the same character he was two and a half years ago, the political and cultural environment around him is utterly different. Democratic politics is now defined by a mood of emergency, and a give-no-quarter ethos on issues like racial justice and abortion rights where liberals view their fundamental values as under assault.
Mr. Biden’s resistance to accommodating that mood may well come to define his campaign.
[In defending his remarks about segregationists, Mr. Biden omitted some history.]
Stories that voters once heard as folksy tales of the last century’s Senate no longer sound so benign to an electorate convulsed by President Trump’s blunt appeals to racial animus. A majority of Americans believe race relations have worsened under Mr. Trump, and liberal constituencies appear far less receptive to the idea that even the worst racists can be negotiated with.
Cornell William Brooks, the former president of the N.A.A.C.P., said Mr. Biden had to recognize that the political times had changed more drastically than the passage of just a few years would imply.
“The White House has used racial and ethnic Balkanization as a campaign strategy, with xenophobia as a reliable theme,” Mr. Brooks said. “In this context, to talk about two segregationist senators as a measure of one’s civility is a false note.”
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Mr. Brooks, now a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, said Mr. Biden had a “reservoir of credibility” with Democrats that left him room to correct course — if he would abandon Southern segregationists as a reference point in his rhetoric of conciliation and bipartisanship. Mr. Brooks took particular exception to Mr. Biden’s recounting of Mr. Eastland referring to him as “son” rather than “boy,” a term often applied dismissively to African-Americans.
“People appreciate you being able to cross the partisan aisle,” Mr. Brooks said, “but they also want to know where you draw the moral line.”
This is not the first time in Mr. Biden’s brief campaign that he has faced pressure to repudiate aspects of the worldview and political style that defined him as a senator and vice president. This month, Mr. Biden reversed his longtime opposition to government funding for abortion, after aides and women’s rights advocates impressed upon him that a conservative crackdown on abortion rights had transformed the political dynamics around the issue.
In April, facing criticism from a number of women who said he had made them uncomfortable with his physical manner — a trait that had long been in public view — Mr. Biden said he saw tactile contact as part of making “a human connection” but acknowledged, “Social norms have begun to change.”
Mr. Biden also continues to face intensive scrutiny of his record on race and law-enforcement policy, particularly his role in negotiating a punitive criminal-justice law in the 1990s with Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, a former segregationist at whose funeral Mr. Biden delivered a eulogy in 2003.
Yet Mr. Biden’s belief in the power of bipartisanship, of looking past ideological and even moral lines to forge deals in government, is far more central to his political identity than even his views on abortion. His ability to reach out to conservatives and woo them to his side is fundamental to his campaign strategy and to his theory of governing: Mr. Biden has claimed that he could win states as red as South Carolina in the general election, and that he could jawbone even the Republican senators who thwarted the Obama administration’s agenda into cooperating with him.
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In the big picture of politics, Mr. Biden may not have the worse end of the argument: A Pew survey published this week found that most Americans, including about 7 in 10 Democrats, said it was very important for elected officials to make compromises. But partisans on the left and right were mostly interested in having the other side make concessions.
Where Mr. Biden’s preference for comity intersects with foundational issues like gender and race, Democrats may have far less patience for his views. Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at the University of London’s Birkbeck College, said his research showed white progressives in particular had grown rapidly more alarmed about racism in recent years, with their shift in attitudes propelled by social media and the rise of Mr. Trump. As a consequence, they are far less interested in accommodating attitudes they see as reactionary.
“Being willing to do business would be, essentially, sullying yourself,” Mr. Kaufmann said, paraphrasing this view. “It would be a violation of the sacred, rather than seeing it as a transaction.”
Mr. Biden and his advisers continue to believe there are more than enough voters who will be sympathetic to his account of his record of maneuvering in the Senate. Kate Bedingfield, an adviser to Mr. Biden, stressed on CNN Friday morning that the point of the story was that sometimes it is necessary to work with people “whose views you find repugnant.”
She noted, “The vice president, I think, was frustrated that a story he’s told many times was being taken out of context.”
To Mr. Biden’s critics, however, it is the different context — the present — that matters most.
In his call this week for Mr. Biden to apologize, Mr. Booker chided him for not being more sensitive to the current political atmosphere — “a time when we have, in the highest offices in the land, divisiveness, racial hatred and bigotry being spewed.”