“The truth of the matter is, you all, you all know, you all know in your gut what has to be done. We can disagree in the margins but the truth of the matter is it’s all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change,” he said

That was in his comments as well.

Edit to add:

Here is a great take on why Biden’s bipartisanship plan fails today.

Some people are expressing shock or disapproval that Biden would talk about segregationists in anything other than a disapproving tone, but that’s a misinterpretation of the point he was trying to make. His comments deserve to be critiqued but not for that reason.

He was using them as examples of how it used to be possible to hammer out deals even with people you strongly disagree with or even see as morally reprehensible. He wasn’t praising their civility but only trying to express what ought to be achievable even in our presently divided country. In trying to place a large distance between himself and Sens. Eastland and Talmadge he may also have been trying to compensate for some of his less-then-fully-enlightened views on racial issues in the early part of his Senate career.

Biden being Biden, he didn’t realize that his comments would be received in a quite different light by the current base of the Democratic Party. Few Democrats today see civil relationships with segregationists as a plus, even if it smooths the way for a functional Congress that can pay its bills on time.

The real problem with Biden’s worldview isn’t that he’s misjudged the Democratic electorate, nor that his re-telling of history is too rose-colored, but that he’s most likely wrong about what is possible.

When the Democratic Party was divided between north and south, they could hash out most of their internal disagreements and keep the country’s lights on. But now that the two parties are divided north and south, this is no longer a fraternal and often amicable dispute. Senators Eastland and Talmadge needed people like Joe Biden in order to maintain themselves in the majority and keep their committee gavels. Today, the senators from Mississippi and Georgia have no such use for the current senators from Delaware.

Remember: “If you have formed a perfect society in terms of culture, race, and religion, there is no such thing as ‘progress.’ Progress is perversion, since every change is a descent from the ideal.”

The current Republican Party is a southern party. They are waging a war against immigration and secularism because they do not want to see change in what they perceive as “a perfect society.” When these same people were Democrats, they fought to preserve slavery and Jim Crow, but now they are outside the tent pissing in, and getting them to work civilly or constructively with progressive reformers is a fool’s errand.

https://progresspond.com/2019/06/19/where-biden-is-right-and-wrong-about-bygone-civility/

Or you can simply say, "until last election female and minorites in Congress were both less than 1/5, so odds greatly predict that anyone with experience and strong national cross-over will be a white male". With females hitting about 25% and minorities increasing and those in office getting more experience and visibility, this calculus may change a bit in say 8-10 years. Right now it's a bit of a trendy scramble, where some people will think Stacey Abrams as a realistic contender.

Realistically, Senate leader/Trump enabler/supreme court justice-stealer McConnell's probably done much more damage to minorities than Eastland could muster as a mere Senator (things that wouldn't have happened by other southerners anyway), especially in the later years that Biden knew him. But that's just PP getting all muddled up by reality.