Just Wait Until the Dems Bring Up Biden's Segregation Talk from the '70s - It'll Be a Political Bloodbath
It’s already a reasonably crowded field for the 2020 Democrat presidential nomination and the favorite hasn’t even pulled up to the starting gate. That, of course, is former Vice President Joe Biden, who currently enjoys a nearly 10-point lead in the RealClearPolitics polling average.
Even at a time when the Democrats are morphing into a party that’s far younger and far more leftist than it was just five years ago, Biden still seems to be the perfect candidate. He’s the most electable link to the halcyon Barack Obama years, given that Hillary Clinton is damaged goods (and has officially announced she’s staying out of the race anyhow).
At 76, Biden has acted as an éminence grise since leaving office, providing that your vision of éminences grise involves guys who occasionally like to fantasize about beating up the president.
He’s run twice, so he has the experience. (Granted, one run more or less ended over a plagiarism scandal and the other run couldn’t gain the slightest bit of momentum.)
He’s an establishment favorite who can turn hard to the left should need be.
Yet, as The New York Times points out, “there is still one crucial element outstanding: full and final consent from the former vice president himself.”
“This juxtaposition — an eager cadre of supporters laying the groundwork for a campaign they assure is all but certain while the would-be candidate publicly vacillates — has effectively kept the nascent Democratic race on hold,” The Times reported Thursday.
“Mr. Biden’s decision looms as perhaps the most significant unanswered question of the 2020 contest and his entry could bring shape to what has been a diffuse Democratic primary, providing voters with a clear front-runner.”
What could the delay be? Anyone could have a theory — and Biden certainly can afford to take his sweet time — but I’d like to proffer that maybe he’s trying to figure out how to explain things he said when times were very different in a presidential race where his long career in politics could be his greatest weakness.
To say that Biden’s time in politics stretches back a long way is an understatement. The Democrat frontrunner was first elected to the Senate in 1972. That was, for those of you who have forgotten, the height of the busing controversy, where many locales tried to affect school desegregation by sending white children to majority-black schools and vice versa.
Biden was opposed, but as The Washington Post notes, his language in opposing forced busing is almost certainly going to be used against him.
“I do not buy the concept, popular in the ’60s, which said, ‘We have suppressed the black man for 300 years and the white man is now far ahead in the race for everything our society offers. In order to even the score, we must now give the black man a head start, or even hold the white man back, to even the race,'” Biden told The People Paper, a weekly newspaper in his native Delaware, back in 1975, according to The Post. “I don’t buy that.”
Even more damaging in a year where reparations are a hot topic: “I don’t feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather. I feel responsible for what the situation is today, for the sins of my own generation. And I’ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago.”
“Biden’s statements 44 years ago represent one of the earliest chapters in his well-documented record on racial issues, during which he generally has worked alongside African American leaders and been embraced by them,” Matt Viser wrote in The Post. “He supported the extension of the Voting Rights Act, amendments to the Fair Housing Act, sanctions against apartheid South Africa and the creation of a holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. In 2010, he pushed to roll back sentencing that many believed exacerbated racial disparities.
“But Biden and civil rights leaders also have occasionally parted ways, and his career probably would be viewed through a new lens if he decides to run for president in a Democratic Party that has moved to the left and grown more ethnically diverse, even in the years since he was elected vice president.”
Now, let’s note here that government-imposed busing didn’t work and never would have. “He never thought busing was the best way to integrate schools in Delaware — a position which most people now agree with,” Biden spokesman Bill Russo said. “As he said during those many years of debate, busing would not achieve equal opportunity. And it didn’t.”
Then again, look at the way it was phrased. In a Democratic primary where the only context is now and every candidate should have anticipated the values of the American left in 2019, that sounds like a segregationist talking and defending his white privilege.
The Post story about his opposition to busing may have made the most impact, but it wasn’t the only recent story regarding Biden’s statements as a senator that haven’t aged well for the modern Democrat audience.
Take a CNN article about Biden’s support for the 1993 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, probably best known for enacting the federal “three-strikes” rule that mandated that violent offenders with two or more prior felonies would automatically receive life in prison.
“We have predators on our streets that society has in fact, in part because of its neglect, created,” Biden said in a 1993 speech on the floor of the Senate.
“They are beyond the pale many of those people, beyond the pale,” he said. “And it’s a sad commentary on society. We have no choice but to take them out of society.”
He continued to describe a “cadre of young people, tens of thousands of them, born out of wedlock, without parents, without supervision, without any structure, without any conscience developing because they literally … because they literally have not been socialized, they literally have not had an opportunity.”
“(W)e should focus on them now,” he said, because “if we don’t, they will, or a portion of them, will become the predators 15 years from now.”
Remember Hillary Clinton having to apologize for “superpredator?” Consider the content of this speech and ask yourself which is going to be more difficult to extricate oneself from in the environs of the modern Democratic Party. An explanation from Russo, who said that the speech was in response to Republican criticisms that Biden was too soft on crime, is almost possibly the worst justification his camp could have given.
Stories like this are going to start appearing with some regularity if just because it’s the best possible way to chip away at that 10-point advantage.
Again, this is a party moving fast to the left. Biden’s first presidential run came 31 years ago, in 1988. Things Clinton said during her presidential run three years ago would be an outrage in this field. The debates, in other words, could turn into bloodbaths for the former vice president.
Could Biden be shoring up his base within the party, assuring them he never really believed things that may have sounded perfectly reasonable at the time but are unforgivable solecisms in 2019? Could that be something holding up his announcement?
I can’t lay claim to inside information, but I can tell you this much: He’d better be prepared for the onslaught from all of these things.
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