Vice President Biden is way off base, in our view, with his suggestion that President Trump has more in common with George Wallace than George Washington. The Democratic primary front-runner unleashed that libel in a speech Wednesday at Iowa. We’re not intending to defend Mr. Trump’s own errors. Mr. Biden, though, leaves out a lot, starting with the fact that George Wallace was a Democrat.

That was in the era when all too many Democrats were defending Jim Crow. One would think that Mr. Biden would have at least acknowledged that fact. The former veep, after all, has himself just been under fire for boasting of working together in the Senate with some of the most notorious Democratic Party segregationists, like James Eastland and Herman Talmadge.

It’s not that we seek to make common cause with those who fault Mr. Biden for working with the likes of Eastland, who chaired the Judiciary Committee that Mr. Biden would end up chairing. We grasp why Mr. Biden felt he had to get along with the ilk he did. No, it’s the Biden hypocrisy that is so obnoxious. And the demoguery of carrying on the policy debate with the tactic of ad hominemism.

There is no doubt that George Wallace was, in the peak years of his career in Alabama politics, a segregationist of the worst sort. He hadn’t started out as an apostle of hate, though. In his first run for governor, in 1958, he ran — and lost — as a moderate, supported by the NAACP. Four years later, he ran — and won — with the vow, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

We met Wallace only once, in 1969, when we were a young reporter on the Anniston, Alabama, Star. It was owned by H. Brandt Ayers, one of the heroic southern newspaper proprietors* who risked their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to throw in with the civil rights movement. Wallace was not in office at the time, and we spent an hour with him in an off-the-record palaver.

Wallace struck us in private as less the devil than he’d sought to position himself as being. That bad-boy-ism is the one quality he might be said to share with Mr. Trump. Wallace’s better streak returned to public view late in his career, when he became a born-again Christian and renounced his segregationist ways. He won a final term as governor with the support of Alabama’s black voters he’d once forsaken.

Could such a transformation happen with Mr. Trump? On his worst day we don’t think Mr. Trump exhibits the kind of racism George Wallace did when he defended segregation in the Yellowhammer State. The constitutional grant of power to fix the problem on the Rio Grande, moreover, belongs to the Congress, where Mr. Biden was among the many who, on various excuses, failed to address the problem adequately.

As for George Washington, it’s just bizarre for Mr. Biden to bring our first president in as a comparative figure at this juncture without mentioning that Washington owned slaves. That may not eclipse the First President’s titanic contributions to our county, of which he was the most famous Founding Father. In our view, though, Mr. Biden should have dealt with the slavery question, awkward though it may be for him.

For Washington reminds us all that not even our greatest leaders are perfect. They can have profound faults as well as virtues. In that sense, Mr. Trump has something in common with George Washington, besides the fact that they are but two of the 44 persons whom the states have elevated to the presidency. Mr. Biden seems diminished in comparison as he affects taking the high road while veering onto the low.

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* Others include Hodding Carter II and Hodding Carter III of the Greenville, Mississippi, broadsheet, the Delta Democrat Times. The son was later President Carter’s assistant secretary of state for public affairs.