PHILADELPHIA — If you have listened to any of the handful of speeches that President Joe Biden has given to black universities, communities, or schools in the past few weeks as his black support has eroded, you would think in just the past few years we had never had the first black president of the United States, vice president, or secretary of defense, or that any person of color had achieved much in the world until Biden became president.

You would also be led to believe that the last president, Donald Trump, wanted to “tear-gas you as you peacefully protested George Floyd’s murder,” as Biden said yesterday here at the historic Girard College, a high-performing high school in this city whose student body is majority black.

It was a continuation of a theme he laid out just over a week ago when he warned graduates at Morehouse, an all-male historically black college in Atlanta, against “extremist forces aligned against the meaning and message of Morehouse.” It was a commencement address that, rather than lifting graduates and offering them aspirations, was instead a lot about him and a lot more about fear and sowing division if he doesn’t win in November.

“Graduates, this is what we’re up against,” he said. “They peddle a fiction, a character about what being a man is about — tough talk, abusing power, bigotry. Their idea of being a man is toxic.”

Biden spent most of his Girard speech listing a series of racial tropes that included, “what do you think would have happened if black Americans had stormed the Capitol? I don’t think he’d be talking about pardons,” and a claim that Trump and his “MAGA extremists … are banning books … and they are trying to erase black history.”

All in all, Biden said the word “black” 48 times at Girard, but never once mentioned the words “unity,” “inflation,” or “groceries.” It was an interesting choice given that black voters in a series of recent surveys said that just as for their white, Hispanic, and Asian neighbors, the persistence of stubbornly high inflation costs in their daily lives remains a huge concern.

In a state such as Pennsylvania, where just under 10% of eligible voters are black, losing them to either Trump or Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West, or Jill Stein, or to them just deciding to stay home, could cost him this state he won by only 80,000 votes in 2020.

In poll after poll Biden is struggling to unite black voters around his candidacy, which is why yesterday he began “Black Voters for Biden-Harris” here. The campaign also said it would educate these voters as well as register them and “strengthen voter protection” efforts to “safeguard the Black vote from continued MAGA attacks.”

But here is the thing: Most voters of all races, but particularly minority voters, don’t like to be segregated, and black working-class voters see their problems no different than their white co-workers and neighbors.

That’s not to say the politics of division never works. Consider former President Barack Obama. He ran a very aspirational first campaign that highlighted his oratory skills with a message of “Hope and Change” that brought together people of all political beliefs and races.

However, Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign was quite different, very divisive, and meant to drive out the New Deal Democrats and move toward a coalition of the ascendant.

If you remember, that was the year Biden told a Danville, Virginia, crowd that the House GOP budget, partly written by then vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman at the time, was an indication of the Republican presidential ticket’s values.

Biden said, “Romney said in the first 100 days he’s going to let the big banks once again write their own rules, ‘unchain Wall Street,’” he said to the crowd, adding, “They’re going to put y’all back in chains.”

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Obama still won, but with fewer votes. Yes, fewer votes. But Obama could afford to shed some votes and still win handily, which he did. Biden cannot — so his decision to go from running to bring the country together in 2020 to a divisional message might make sense in theory because he lived in 2012.

But Biden is not Obama.