The Official Joe Biden - KAMALA HARRIS Thread

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Never liked Biden.


source: Snopes

Did Joe Biden Once Say He Was Conservative About Most Issues Except Civil Rights?

joe-biden.jpg



Claim
Joe Biden once said that, “When it comes to civil rights and civil liberties, I’m a liberal but that’s it. I’m really quite conservative on most other issues.”


Origin
In their June 1974 issue, the D.C. monthly Washingtonian ran a lengthy profile on then-Sen. Joe Biden, a Democrat who in November 1972 beat a two-term incumbent Republican to become the youngest U.S. senator in history. The profile was wide-ranging, touching on a variety of political and personal issues including his political future and the trauma of losing his wife, Neilia, and daughter, Naomi, in a car accident just weeks after his successful Senate bid. The Washingtonian highlighted Biden’s unusual candor in this feature. “Joe Biden was a lot more careful around the press after this 1974 profile,” the online version of the story now reads.

Biden, vice president under President Barack Obama, is seen as a leading potential presidential candidate for 2020, and in this light, the interview has come under renewed scrutiny amid debates over the future direction of the Democratic party and how far left its nominee should be. In one section of the Washingtonian profile, Biden rejected the notion he was a progressive liberal, suggesting that receiving such a label from the progressive political group Americans for Democratic Action was a political liability that he sought to avoid (emphasis ours):

Biden … resents being called the bright young liberal of the New Left. “I hate that picture,” he says, “and I don’t care how that damn Americans for Democratic Action rates me. Those ADA ratings get us into so much trouble that a lot of us sit around thinking up ways to vote conservative just so we don’t come out with a liberal rating.

When it comes to civil rights and civil liberties, I’m a liberal but that’s it. I’m really quite conservative on most other issues. My wife said I was the most socially conservative man she had ever known. I’m a screaming liberal when it comes to senior citizens because I really think they are getting screwed. I’m a liberal on health care because I believe it is a birth right of every human being—not just some damn privilege to be meted out to a few people. But when it comes to issues like abortion, amnesty, and acid, I’m about as liberal as your grandmother.

I don’t like the Supreme Court decision on abortion. I think it went too far. I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body. I support a limited amnesty, and I don’t think marijuana should be legalized. Now, if you still think I’m a liberal, let me tell you that I support the draft. I’m scared to death of a professional army. I vote my own way and it is not always with the Democrats. I did vote for George McGovern, of course, but I would have voted for Mickey Mouse against Richard Nixon. I despise that man.”

Biden’s views on several of these issues have changed since 1974. In 2007, Biden was given a 0% score by the (pro-life) National Right to Life Committee and a 75% score by the NARAL Pro-Choice America. He stated during the 2012 election cycle that he opposed abortion due to his Catholic upbringing, but that this view does not inform his public-policy views. “I accept church rule personally, but not in public life,” he said in October 2012.

Though he stated in 1974 that his most liberal policy stances came in the area of civil rights, civil-rights leaders viewed his early career in the Senate in this area as anything but liberal. Though a champion of school-integration efforts during his 1972 Senate campaign, he became a fierce opponent of school-busing programs that sought to balance the racial demographics of public schools, as described by Politco in 2015:

Biden … had expressed support for integration and—more specifically—busing during his Senate campaign in 1972, but once elected, he discovered just how bitterly his white constituents opposed the method. In 1973 and 1974, Biden began voting for many of the Senate’s anti-busing bills, claiming that he favored school desegregation, but just objected to “forced busing.”

Then, as a court-ordered integration plan loomed over Wilmington, Delaware, in 1974, Biden’s constituents transformed their resistance to busing into an organized—and angry—opposition. So Biden transformed, too. That year, Joe Biden morphed into a leading anti-busing crusader—all the while continuing to insist that he supported the goal of school desegregation, he only opposed busing as the means to achieve that end. This stance, which many of Biden’s liberal and moderate colleagues also held, was clever but disingenuous. It enabled Biden to choose votes over principles, while acting as if he was not doing so.

In sum, Biden did characterize himself in 1974 as liberal on civil rights and civil liberties but conservative on other issues.

Sources
  • Kelley, Kitty. “Death and the All-American Boy.”
    Washingtonian. 1 June 1974.

  • Herndon, Astead. “Biden and Sanders Lead the 2020 Field in Iowa, Poll Finds.”
    New York Times. 10 March 2019.

  • VoteSmart.org. “Joe Biden, Jr.’s Ratings and Endorsements on Issue: Abortion”
    Accessed 11 March 2018.

  • OnTheIssues.org. “2012 Vice Presidential Debate Rep. Paul Ryan (R) vs. V.P. Joe Biden (D) Oct. 11, 2012.”
    Accessed 11 March 2018.
BY ALEX KASPRAK
PUBLISHED 11 MARCH 2019

 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
source: Politico Magazine

90


How a Young Joe Biden Turned Liberals Against Integration
Forty years ago, the Senate supported school busing—until a 32-year-old changed his mind.



Forty years ago, a contentious battle over racial justice gripped Capitol Hill, pitting the nation’s lone African-American senator against the man who would one day become Barack Obama’s vice president. The issue was school busing, a plan to transport white and black students out of their neighborhoods to better integrate schools—and at the time the most explosive issue on the national agenda.

Ed Brooke, a Massachusetts Republican, was the first black senator ever to be popularly elected; Joe Biden was a freshman Democratic senator from Delaware. By 1975, both had compiled liberal voting records. But that year, Biden sided with conservatives and sponsored a major anti-busing amendment. The fierce debate that followed not only fractured the Senate’s bloc of liberals, it also signified a more wide-ranging political phenomenon: As white voters around the country—especially in the North—objected to sweeping desegregation plans then coming into practice, liberal leaders retreated from robust integration policies.

Biden was at the forefront of this retreat: He had expressed support for integration and—more specifically—busing during his Senate campaign in 1972, but once elected, he discovered just how bitterly his white constituents opposed the method. In 1973 and 1974, Biden began voting for many of the Senate’s anti-busing bills, claiming that he favored school desegregation, but just objected to “forced busing.”

Then, as a court-ordered integration plan loomed over Wilmington, Delaware, in 1974, Biden’s constituents transformed their resistance to busing into an organized—and angry—opposition. So Biden transformed, too. That year, Joe Biden morphed into a leading anti-busing crusader—all the while continuing to insist that he supported the goal of school desegregation, he only opposed busing as the means to achieve that end.

This stance, which many of Biden’s liberal and moderate colleagues also held, was clever but disingenuous. It enabled Biden to choose votes over principles, while acting as if he was not doing so.

History has not been kind to the defenders of school busing. Indeed, busing was problematic—as it transported children long distances away from nearby schools. But to say most whites objected to busing because it was inconvenient would be wrong. The truth is that many of them were not comfortable with the racial change that busing brought.

***

By the dawn of the 1970s, southern schools were finally beginning to integrate. Though the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision had outlawed “separate but equal” schools, it wasn’t until the court’s lesser-known 1969 ruling in Alexander v. Holmes County that many southern school districts actually implemented desegregation plans. In response to these legal mandates, judges started to order busing plans in some southern cities.

Meanwhile, Northern schools still remained thoroughly segregated. Housing segregation frequently produced segregated schools, and many urban school boards enacted transfer and re-districting policies to keep them that way. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, African-American parents in the North filed lawsuits in protest. They alleged that their children had been denied equal educational opportunity, forced to attend schools that were underfunded and racially segregated. The result of these legal actions in both the North and the South was a truly nationwide debate—spanning from Denver and Detroit to Charlotte and Boston—in which federal district courts often held that busing was the only surefire way to integrate schools.

150803_boston_busing_sokol_gty.jpg

Police escort a black student off a school bus outside South Boston High School on Sept. 12, 1974, the first day of school busing.


The first busing case to reach the Supreme Court was Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg County. A district court had ordered busing in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the plan in April 1971, on the grounds that the Constitution required “the greatest possible degree of actual desegregation.” The court admitted that the remedies for segregation might be “awkward, inconvenient, and even bizarre in some situations and may impose burdens on some.” But the Constitution clearly required such impositions. The Swann decision gave lower court judges wide latitude to devise plans for integration, including the use of busing as a tool. In California, Michigan and Colorado, judges promptly ordered citywide busing plans, concluding that in cities shaped by housing segregation it was impossible to disentangle busing from integration.

Even the supporters of busing allowed that such plans were imperfect, and that cities ought to try other integration measures before resorting to busing. Busing was indeed “awkward” and “inconvenient” for students. Today, the anti-busing arguments guide our policies. In many cities, the “neighborhood school”—itself a product of redlining, housing segregation, and discriminatory school transfer policies—remains sacrosanct. But we forget that through the 1960s and 1970s, local school boards and urban whites often resisted every other attempt at school and housing integration. With their resistance, they narrowed the options down to two: busing or segregation.

The Swann ruling and the court orders that followed triggered a swift backlash. White parents trembled with rage as they envisioned scenarios in which their children would be bused into African-American neighborhoods. Elected officials came out against busing, while still insisting they supported integration. Yet few ever offered an alternative for how to achieve it.

Nowhere did the busing wars play out more dramatically than in Boston. Massachusetts had passed a 1965 law that banned segregated schools. But Boston leaders never attempted to comply with the law. Instead, the Boston School Committee continued to pursue policies designed to preserve segregated schools. Black parents filed a lawsuit in 1972, and the NAACP argued their case. On June 21, 1974, federal judge W. Arthur Garrity found that local officials had deliberately kept Boston’s schools segregated, and that the city must integrate at once. He drew up a busing plan. Black students from Roxbury would attend South Boston High School, while Irish Americans from Southie would board buses to Roxbury.

The first buses rolled through Boston in September 1974—and racial violence engulfed the city. White mobs hurled bricks at school buses with terrified black children inside. Then, on October 7, a Haitian immigrant was beaten savagely by a white mob in South Boston. In the coming months, the list of casualties would grow. The city became a cauldron of racial hatred.

The Boston busing crisis shocked white northerners. Many had long ignored the segregation and racism that marked their cities, clinging to the notion that their region was a beacon to the nation—that it led the way for racial justice. After all, it was northern senators who banded together to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, defeating a record-long southern filibuster. Northern activists had trooped to the deepest reaches of the South, risking their lives for black equality. When Massachusetts passed the Racial Imbalance Act in 1965, residents believed they were making good on their own lofty reputation. And in 1966, Ed Brooke’s election to the U.S. Senate stood as further proof of northern enlightenment.

But the bloody events in Boston illustrated that in many ways white northerners were more committed to pretense than progress.

***

A few months before white mobs milled in the streets of South Boston, the busing controversy also seized Capitol Hill. Each year from 1966 to 1977, the U.S. House of Representatives passed at least one new law designed to restrain school integration—often in the guise of anti-busing legislation. Until 1974, the Senate rejected those bills. But as white resistance to busing escalated in many cities across the country, the House’s anti-busing majority began to pull more senators to their side.

Ed Brooke found himself in a unique predicament. His home state of Massachusetts had become the center of the anti-busing movement. Yet Brooke retained a deep commitment to integrated education, and to busing.

Brooke’s anti-busing constituents challenged him many times. Over and over, he emphatically explained the moral and legal arguments for busing. He pointed out that the Bay State’s Racial Imbalance Act had been on the books since 1965. Yet white Bostonians had opposed all attempts to integrate the schools. In fact, segregation in Boston’s schools had deepened with each passing year. To do nothing would have been to isolate black children in inferior and segregated schools. This was why, he noted, a federal judge had finally ordered a widespread busing plan.

For Brooke, integration was an absolute imperative. Segregated schools denied black children equal opportunity. “We had all-black schools and all-white schools,” he recalled later. Busing “was the best thing that we had to at least desegregate the schools at that time in our history. And I thought we didn’t have anything better.”

In May 1974, the Senate debated the Gurney Amendment to an omnibus education bill; Sen. Edward Gurney’s provision combined a number of restrictions on busing. The most controversial of the anti-busing clauses allowed locales that had maintained Jim Crow schools—even ones that were under explicit desegregation orders—to re-open their cases and to potentially have those desegregation orders nullified.

On May 15, two days before the 20th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Brooke delivered an emotional address on the Senate floor. Gurney’s amendment would “put us back decades,” he thundered. “For two decades, the course has been sure but slow. And now we ask to hastily and drastically alter it. Why? Because many Americans have become confused by the rhetoric on busing.” Brooke boiled it down for them: “The issue is simple. Shall we or shall we not permit necessary remedies to a constitutional violation? ... The fact is that in many cases, busing is necessary to uphold the law.” Brooke called the amendment “unconscionable and unconstitutional,” and moved to table it. The Senate did so, by a single vote.

On May 16, Republican Sen. Robert Griffin of Michigan attempted to revive the anti-busing amendment—without the clause that allowed for the re-opening of court orders. Liberals tried to table this proposal, but they failed by one vote. Minority leader Hugh Scott and majority leader Mike Mansfield then offered a compromise: They’d leave the text of Griffin’s amendment intact—which included various anti-busing restrictions but excised the section about the court orders—and added the qualifier that such legislation was not intended to weaken the judiciary’s power to enforce the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.

Anti-busing leaders denounced the Scott-Mansfield compromise, which passed 47 to 46. Brooke voted for the compromise, satisfied that the language about the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments was a sufficient safeguard of minority students’ rights. The larger omnibus bill, which Brooke also supported, then gained passage by a wide majority.

In the coming months, as busing beset Boston, the ranks of pro-busing senators would shrink even more. But Ed Brooke remained a vocal defender of busing, even as he was vanquished by a young senator who hitched his rising star to the anti-busing movement.

***

At 32 years old, and sporting long sideburns, Joe Biden was the youngest member of the Senate. During his initial 1972 campaign, Biden advocated for racial equality. He questioned the motives of anti-busing leaders and charged that Republicans had exploited the busing issue in order to win white votes. He also supported the Swann decision, and opposed a constitutional amendment banning busing—as did the Republican incumbent he defeated, J. Caleb Boggs.

But during the campaign, Biden had begun to develop a convoluted position in which he supported busing as a remedy for “de jure segregation” (as in the Jim Crow South), while he opposed busing in cases of “de facto segregation” (as in Northern cities). Through his first two years in the Senate, he supported most—but not all—of the anti-busing legislation. In two crucial exceptions, he voted to table the Gurney Amendment in May 1974—and he also voted in favor of the Scott-Mansfield compromise. He sided with Brooke on both votes, and on both occasions their side prevailed by a single vote.

For these few votes, Biden attracted the fury of his white constituents. Delaware residents had formed the New Castle County Neighborhood Schools Association in order to resist desegregation. In June 1974, the group organized an event at the Krebs School in Newport, Delaware—as Brett Gadsden details in Between North and South. The event’s coordinator had recently declared, “We’re going to hound Biden for the next four years if he doesn’t vote our position.” Standing before a Krebs School auditorium packed with angry white parents, Biden explained that he supported busing only as a remedy for “de jure” segregation. He assured the crowd that any segregation in Delaware was “de facto,” and therefore—he claimed—beyond the authority of the courts. The crowd jeered him anyway until he departed. The ugly incident clearly left its mark on the senator.


A year later, in the summer of 1975, Boston erupted in more racial violence and braced for its second year of busing. Meanwhile, Brooke and Biden steeled themselves for a showdown on Capitol Hill.

Sen. Jesse Helms, a Republican from North Carolina, was the first to strike. On September 17, 1975, when a larger education bill came up for debate, Helms offered a crippling anti-integration amendment. It would prevent the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) from collecting any data about the race of students or teachers. In addition, HEW could not “require any school … to classify teachers or students by race.” Thus, HEW could not withhold funding from school districts that refused to integrate. “This is an antibusing amendment,” Helms explained. “This is an amendment to stop the current regiments of faceless, federal bureaucrats from destroying our schools.”

Biden rose to support Helms’s amendment. “I am sure it comes as a surprise to some of my colleagues … that a senator with a voting record such as mine stands up and supports [the Helms amendment].” Helms replied that he was happy to welcome Biden “to the ranks of the enlightened.” After the laughter died down, Biden launched an anti-busing screed. “I have become convinced that busing is a bankrupt concept.” The Senate should declare busing a failure, and focus instead on “whether or not we are really going to provide a better educational opportunity for blacks and minority groups in this country.” He praised Ed Brooke’s initiatives on housing, job opportunities and voting rights. In one breath, Biden seemed to reject busing in the North and the South, and claimed that he was committed to equal opportunity for African Americans.

brooke-secondary-53379483.jpg

Sen. Brooke campaigning for Richard Nixon in 1968.

A few other senators spoke briefly about the amendment, then Brooke sprung to action. The Helms amendment would eviscerate Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Brooke said, which enabled HEW to cut off funding to school districts that refused to integrate. Brooke asserted that the federal government should attempt other integration remedies before resorting to busing. “But if compliance with the law cannot be achieved without busing, then busing must be one of the available desegregation remedies.” Brooke introduced a motion to table Helms’s amendment. Brooke’s motion passed, 48-43. Biden wouldn’t budge, and voted with Jesse Helms and the anti-bussers.

Brooke had fought this fight before, but he would face a more formidable adversary in Joe Biden. When a southern conservative like Helms led the anti-busing forces, Ed Brooke could still rally his troops. But it would be tougher to combat the anti-busing faction when its messenger was a young liberal from a border state.

***

Immediately after the Helms amendment was tabled, Biden proposed his own amendment to the $36 billion education bill, stipulating that none of those federal funds could be used by school systems “to assign teachers or students to schools … for reasons of race.” His amendment would prevent “some faceless bureaucrat” from “deciding that any child, black or white, should fit in some predetermined ratio.” He explained, “All the amendment says is that some bureaucrat sitting down there in HEW cannot tell a school district whether it is properly segregated or desegregated, or whether it should or should not have funds.” Finally, Biden called busing “an asinine policy.”

Brooke pointed out that the amendment would do much more than Biden claimed. Like the Helms gambit, it would still gut Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. But this time, a number of liberal senators that had opposed Helms’s amendment now supported Biden: Warren Magnuson and Scoop Jackson of Washington, where Seattle faced impending integration orders; and Thomas Eagleton and Stuart Symington of Missouri, where Kansas City confronted a similar fate. Mike Mansfield, the majority leader from Montana, also jumped on board. Watching his liberal colleagues defect, Republican Jacob Javits of New York mused, “They’re scared to death on busing.” The Senate approved Biden’s amendment. Biden had managed to turn a 48-43 loss for the anti-busing forces into a 50-43 victory.

In a seminal moment, the Senate thus turned against desegregation. The Senate had supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act, 1965 Voting Rights Act and 1968 Fair Housing Act. In the early 1970s, as President Richard Nixon and the House of Representatives encouraged the anti-busing movement, the Senate remained the last bastion for those who supported strong integration policies. Biden stormed that bastion, and it seemed to be falling. On September 23, another border-state Democrat moved against busing. Robert Byrd, the West Virginian who had since repudiated his Klan past, offered a perfecting amendment. It would prohibit busing beyond a student’s nearest school. It passed the Senate by a vote of 51-45.

Brooke was outraged. He called the vote on Biden’s amendment “the greatest symbolic defeat for civil rights since 1964.” He argued that Biden’s amendment would eliminate virtually every remedy for segregation, as school systems would be prohibited from assigning students on the basis of race no matter what the method. Brooke accused Biden of effectively leading an assault on integration.

Brooke attempted one last maneuver. He tried to nullify the Biden and Byrd riders, but failed to force a vote on the matter. Biden then proposed another amendment, a concession to his liberal critics. It barred HEW from ordering busing, while leaving other integration measures intact. Defending his own civil rights record, Biden explained that his original aim had been only to stop busing, not to hamstring every other attempt at desegregation. This measure, “Biden II,” sailed through the Senate. On September 26, the Senate passed the larger education bill—with Byrd’s rider as well as Biden II—by a margin of 60-18.

Perhaps Brooke foresaw the new political consensus that would take shape in the ensuing decades: Liberals would pay homage to the civil rights movement and its dream of integration, but refrain from championing the legislation that would make that dream a reality. “It is just a matter of time before we wipe out the civil rights progress of the last decade,” Brooke lamented after the passage of the education bill. The clock was turning back.

***

From the beginning, a certain set of circumstances had to exist in order for America’s white majority to stomach forceful measures for integration. Public support depended upon the perception of a fight between good and evil. White Americans had to see desegregation as morally right and segregation as morally wrong. With the onset of busing in northern cities, the situation started to appear ambiguous. Few white northerners viewed busing as a way to provide equal opportunity for black children. In fact, by the mid-1970s, whites viewed themselves as the aggrieved party when it came to busing. They believed that African Americans had already won their rights with the civil rights bills of the previous decade. With little regard or care for whether African-American children would be confined to segregated schools, whites thought their rights were violated if their children couldn’t attend “neighborhood schools.”

African Americans viewed it differently. As Boston NAACP leader Tom Atkins put it in March 1975, “An anti-busing amendment is an anti-desegregation amendment, and an anti-desegregation amendment is an anti-black amendment.”

In October 1975, U.S. News and World Report published a special feature on busing, in which they interviewed a political leader from each side of the issue. Ed Brooke was the face of the pro-busing side. Joe Biden represented anti-busing.

The article read like a tale of the tape. A photo of a youthful Biden topped the left column. If the courts and HEW “continue to handle busing in the manner in which it has been handled,” said Biden, “I would eliminate forced busing under any circumstances.” When asked whether busing caused more harm than good, Biden answered: “Absolutely.” Biden explained that he had examined the arguments used to justify busing. They “seem to me to be profoundly racist.” He claimed that busing reinforced the idea of black inferiority. Busing implied that African Americans could only “cut it educationally” if they sat next to white students. “It implies that blacks have no reason to be proud of their inheritance and their own culture.”

Biden’s logic—that anti-busing was the way to respect African-American culture— allowed the political center-left to coalesce around this brand of opposition to busing. Further, Biden insisted that the majority of white Americans had no objection “to their child sitting with a black child, eating lunch with a black child—all the things that were the basis for the racist movement in the past.” Biden thus divorced the anti-busing position from the racial hatred that occasioned it. To clinch his case, Biden expressed pride in the fact that several Senate liberals had supported his amendment. The anti-busing position was “becoming more respectable,” a development for which he happily took credit.

Brooke offered a nuanced defense of busing. “It is not necessarily the best way,” he said, “but in certain instances busing is the only way to achieve desegregation.” Brooke favored the building of new schools and the consolidation of old ones, for example, if such measures could bring integration. “But when these fail or are inappropriate, busing is a constitutional tool that should be used, and is being used, but only as a last resort.” Brooke realized that the voters disagreed with him on the busing issue. “It’s not popular—certainly among my constituents. I know that. But, you know, I’ve always believed that those of us who serve in public life have a responsibility to inform and provide leadership for our constituents.” The rights of a minority were on the line. Brooke could not bend; he had to lead.

He paid for it. Brooke and Biden were like ships passing in the night. From that point forward, their political careers followed opposite trajectories. In 1978, Brooke ran for a third term. In the six years since his previous reelection campaign, Boston had become not only the center of the anti-busing movement but also a hotbed of anti-abortion activity. Brooke clung to his pro-busing and pro-choice convictions nonetheless. To complicate matters, he endured a messy divorce and was accused of improper financial dealings. Democrat Paul Tsongas defeated Brooke in 1978. Brooke never returned to public office.

Joe Biden was just beginning his political ascent. While he campaigned for reelection in 1978, a busing plan was finally being implemented in Wilmington. Biden’s most rabid anti-busing constituents still perceived him as too liberal on the issue, though Biden denounced the busing plan in Delaware. In the end, Biden’s anti-busing crusades in the Senate had convinced the majority of white voters. He won reelection by a sizable margin.

As Biden settled in for a long Senate career, that body was fast losing its liberal lions. Progressives like Brooke, Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Philip Hart and Jacob Javits had retired, been defeated or passed away. With the Reagan Revolution in the offing, their absence both reflected and enabled the larger conservative trend. The Reagan administration relaxed enforcement of civil rights laws, and few leaders advocated for increased spending or legislation on behalf of racial minorities.

Gradually, busing plans would peter out. Busing had brought a measure of integration to many urban school systems. But without the strong support of leading liberals, and amid whites’ accelerating retreat to the suburbs, many locales soon ditched their busing plans. Conservatives succeeded in writing the first draft of history, in which busing is cited as the exemplar of social engineering run amok.

Biden agreed, and he still does. In his 2007 memoir (titled Promises to Keep), Biden called busing “a liberal train wreck.” Alas, Biden was a product—and a symbol—of his times. He was a liberal in the age of the white backlash and the Reagan Democrats. In order to sustain a long political career, it was often necessary to avoid difficult stands—especially when it came to issues of racial equality.

Elected officials drew an important lesson from the busing ordeal of the 1970s: Bold pushes for racial change entailed political death. It was better to abandon them.




 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
source: JACOBIN

Joe Biden, the Anti-Busing Democrat

Joe Biden likes to portray himself as a civil rights champion. But in the 1970s, he was a prominent opponent of one of the era’s key desegregation measures: school busing.


It looks like Joe Biden is running. With Beltway insiders and Democratic bigwigs talking up his presidential chances, the former vice-president looks to be the candidate to beat in the 2020 primaries.

The only problem is, it’s Joe Biden. If you thought Hillary Clinton was a weak candidate, with her transactional style and triangulating policy stances, then you probably won’t be excited by Biden’s multi-decade history in the Senate.

Apart from Clinton’s inept campaigning and inability to connect with voters, Biden shares many of the same red flags that led a large share of the Democratic base to look with suspicion on the former secretary of state.

In this series, Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic takes a look back at the career of Delaware’s longtime senior senator. Below is Part I: Biden and Busing.

Biden’s time as a suburban public housing advocate before entering politics led him to claim he was strongly backed by his local black community. “I still walk down the street in the black side of town,” he told the Washington Post in 1975. “Mousey and Chops and all the boys at 13th, and — I can walk in those pool halls, and quite frankly don’t know another white man involved in Delaware politics who can do that kind of thing.”

There’s a good reason Biden felt the need to boast about his supposed closeness with Delaware’s black community at this time. In an attempt to remedy pervasive racial segregation, that decade saw cities start to bus black students into suburban schools and white students into inner city schools. Biden earned controversy by becoming one of the program’s fiercest opponents.

Biden called busing “the atom bomb of anti-discrimination weapons,” and worked to stop busing in his home state, calling it “the single most devastating issue that could occur to Delaware.” In 1975, he put forward an anti-busing provision that barred the Department of Health, Education and Welfare from using federal funds “to assign students or teachers by race,” broad language that actually barred the department from taking anti-segregation actions beyond just busing.

The amendment was meant to be a “softer” alternative to one put forward by hall-of-fame racist and Biden friend Jesse Helms, a version Biden had actually initially supported. Still, the New York Times at the time charged that Biden’s supposedly more moderate alternative would “signal a major crumbling of federal determination to achieve equal justice,” and called it “a real threat not only to the gains of the sixties, but to decency in this society.” The Washington Post was equally disapproving.

The fact that the measure started getting vocal support from various bigots quickly became embarrassing for Biden. Yet it didn’t stop him from using rhetoric that could best be described as politely racist. Biden claimed that legitimate desegregation was only supposed to cure de jure — or explicitly racist — segregation, and that in some of its forms, it was integration that was actually “racist and insulting.” Anti-segregationists, he charged were saying “that your black, curly-haired son has to be in the class with my white, straight-haired one before he can get a decent education,” adding that “I don’t feel responsible for my father’s sins — only for my sins.”

By 1975, Biden was boasting that he had “made it—if not respectable—I’ve made it reasonable for longstanding liberals to begin to raise the questions I’ve been the first to raise in the liberal community” regarding busing. He predicted that liberal holdouts would “see the light and switch sides on busing too.”

Despite Biden’s claims that he was still cool with “Mousey and Chops and all the boys at 13th,” other African Americans didn’t seem so sold on the senator. One longtime civil rights activist criticized Biden’s attempt to make a distinction between de jure and other kinds of segregation, and called his rhetoric “glib” and “drivel,” explaining that busing was about getting black kids the educational resources that only flowed to white schools. A coalition of civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, later sued over Biden’s amendment.

One year after this, Biden put forward another bill, this one barring federal judges from ordering busing unless they could prove there was intentional discrimination going on. According to the Post, at the time, both pro- and anti-busing forces considered it “the most far-reaching anti-busing measure to receive serious consideration in the Senate.” Though it was voted down, Biden celebrated that the close vote signalled the “death toll” for Senate support of busing.

It’s hard to know how much of Biden’s anti-busing crusade reflected his personal views. After all, around this same time, he was in the midst of a re-election campaign that saw his opponent charge that Biden was “too liberal for Delaware.” And it was far from the last time. In the lead-up to his 2008 campaign, Biden repeatedly invokedDelaware’s history as a slave state to appeal to southern conservatives, telling a Republican Rotary Club that Delaware only fought with the Union because “we couldn’t figure out how to get to the South.”

Biden’s strategy of race-baiting to win over Republican voters bodes poorly if he’s going to be running against Trump in 2020. There’s also the fact that Biden voted again and again for the unsuccessful Helms-Collins amendment, which would have stopped the Justice Department from defending busing in court. The vote came in 1980, well after he had won re-election.

As late as 2007, Biden called busing a “liberal train wreck.” Yet, as Asher Smith has pointed out, this year, sensing which way the winds have blown, Biden had the gall to claim that he “cast the deciding vote to allow courts to keep busing as a remedy,” because “there are some things that are worth losing over.”

Biden’s actions on busing might at least be partly mitigated by his personal activism. As Biden was fond of telling the public, he “participated in sit-ins to desegregate restaurants and movie houses,” and his “soul raged on seeing Bull Connor and his dogs.”

Except Biden later admitted that he “was not an activist” and that he had simply “worked at an all-black swimming pool in the east side of Wilmington” during the civil rights movement. “I was involved in what they were thinking, what they were feeling,” he said. “But I was not out marching … I was not down in Selma. I was not anywhere else. I was a suburbanite kid who got a dose of exposure to what was happening to black Americans.” (Biden also explained that he didn’t join the antiwar movement because “I’m not big on flak jackets and tie-dyed shirts”).

While Biden’s time at the swimming pool may not have contributed anything tangible to the civil rights movement, his anti-busing work had a far-reaching legacy. His relentless campaign against busing helped contribute to today’s untenable situation, where school segregation is worse than at any point since the Brown v. Board of Education ruling.
 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
source: JACOBIN

Joe Biden, the Hawk

If you’re looking for a president with a track record of boosting foreign intervention, expanding the surveillance state, and steadfastly backing Israel despite its war crimes, Joe Biden is your guy.

It looks like Joe Biden is running. With Beltway insiders and Democratic bigwigs talking up his presidential chances, the former vice-president looks to be the candidate to beat in the 2020 primaries.

The only problem is, it’s Joe Biden. If you thought Hillary Clinton was a weak candidate, with her transactional style and triangulating policy stances, then you probably won’t be excited by Biden’s multi-decade history in the Senate.

Apart from Clinton’s inept campaigning and inability to connect with voters, Biden shares many of the same red flags that led a large share of the Democratic base to look with suspicion on the former secretary of state.

In this series, Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic takes a look back at the career of Delaware’s longtime senior senator. Below is Part II: Biden, the Hawk.

If the next president of the United States is a Democrat, one of their major tasks will be to stand up to the national security state.

Back in 2008, Obama was widely thought to be that figure, campaigning (and winning) on a rejection of the Bush-era “war on terror” before entrenching and expanding it once in power. As the world watched Obama hand control of this machine to Donald Trump, it served as a sobering reminder of why any future Democratic president would need to take seriously the task of confronting the Washington consensus on national security.

Joe Biden wouldn’t be that president.

Biden has operated for nearly five decades in the Beltway. Over that time, on issues like foreign intervention, Israel, and the expansion of national security powers, Biden has proven himself a reliable representative of the national security establishment, a role he’d more than likely continue once in power.

An Itch to Intervene

To be sure, Biden is no Hillary Clinton when it comes to foreign intervention. He’s registered some antiwar positions from time to time, as when he voted against the first Gulf War or opposed the funding of the Nicaraguan contras in the 1980s. But overall, he’s racked up a track record of supporting overseas adventures.

Biden wanted to send US troops to Darfur in 2007 and later suggestedputting in place a no-fly zone. No one is in favor of permitting genocide, obviously, but as cases like Libya and Syria have shown, such military intervention often has far-reaching ramifications that lead to massive human suffering. Biden was also a key architect of the 1999 bombing of Serbia, which actually dissolved the local pro-democracy movement and rallied popular support around the country’s dictator.

“I voted to go into Iraq, and I’d vote to do it again,” Biden said in August 2003. He also supported the war on Afghanistan, and his 2009 strategy for the war there appears to have served as the model for Trump’s current actions in the country. He even backed the UK’s invasion of the Falkland Islands.

Biden has also been a consistent supporter of expanding NATO into what Russia considers its sphere of influence, a key driver of today’s planet-threatening tensions with the country. Biden called the 1998 NATO induction of three eastern bloc countries — a major provocation of Russia — “the beginning of another fifty years of peace,” coming only four years after the Clinton administration had explicitly and falsely assured Russian president Boris Yeltsin that the US wasn’t seeking to broaden NATO’s membership.

While Putin is an authoritarian who regularly engages in political interference and mischief beyond his country’s borders, this doesn’t absolve Biden and others for baiting Russia’s leadership with what amounts to a sustained, long-term provocation.

Biden has reportedly become more anti-interventionist since voting for Iraq, opposing the bombing of Libya, sending more troops to Afghanistan, arming the Syrian rebels, and even the reckless Bin Laden raid (though he went on to brag about the latter at the 2012 Democratic National Convention). These are all good things.

But like other supposed non-interventionists, Biden’s aversion to military involvement only applies to ground forces en masse. He was a champion of what he called “counterterrorism plus”: a combination of drone strikes and special forces, which essentially became Obama’s approach to fighting terrorism. In other words, if you like Obama’s approach to fighting terrorism, with Biden, you can keep it.

But Obama’s anti-terror strategy was controversial for a reason. While the lack of full-scale invasions made foreign intervention more palatable to the voting public, it also allowed the military to quietly broaden its involvement throughout the world, to the point where the news of four US special forces soldiers dying in Niger last year took many by surprise — chiefly because no one had no idea soldiers were even operating in the country to begin with.

Worse, this approach has resulted in not just unspeakable brutalitybeing visited upon ordinary civilians, but in feeding anti-American resentment in the region, ensuring the “war on terror” will go on and on. It’s an approach we can thank Biden for.


Israel’s Man in Washington

The Overton window currently seems to be shifting on Israel and Palestine, with Democratic voters moving leftward on the issue, and various prominent politicians on the Left following them, Bernie Sanders among them. Lobbyists for the country bite their fingernails as the fastest growing US demographics are increasingly more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.

Yet under a President Biden, with his long, chummy relationship with Israel, the Overton window on this issue would likely be shut and padlocked.

Biden’s has been known as one of Israel’s “close friends” in Congress for practically his entire political career. He disapprovingly lectured Israeli officials from time to time, as when he warned Menachem Begin in 1982 that Israel’s illegal settlements were hurting the country’s US popularity. But Biden has never exerted any real pressure on Israeli officials to change their behavior.


A Friend of Surveillance


At the same time Biden was supposedly “mad as the devil” about Israeli settlements in the 1980s, he was a reliable advocate for Israeli interests in Congress. When Jimmy Carter decided not to renew an agreement that gave Israel preference in buying industrial diamonds from the US at a negotiated price, Biden and four other Senate Foreign Relations Committee members wrote to him to reconsider.

Only a month before his exchange with Begin, Biden voted to not only dramatically step up aid to Israel — over the objections of Reagan, no less — but supported a measure that would ensure US aid to Israel would forever be equal to the amount of US debt repaid by the country.

“It’s one of the most extraordinary proposals I have heard,” said California Democrat Alan Cranston, the then-chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, who opposed the measure. “The first time in the history of the United States. It makes the American taxpayer responsible for all Israeli debts and all future debts.”

This arrangement would end up being crucial for Israel to keep being furnished with weapons and cash by the United States. Due to a 1975 law, any country that fell behind on its loan payments by more than a year lost access to US aid. This change in policy effectively ensured Israel was always guaranteed to avoid this fate.

Even as outrage piled on over Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Biden held the line and assured Begin he wasn’t critical of the invasion. Less than a week after Israeli forces slaughtered thousands of Palestinian refugees in the country, Biden went to a four-day retreat held by the United Jewish Appeal Young Leadership Cabinet, where he spoke alongside the executive director of AIPAC and Benjamin Netanyahu (one of Biden’s old friends), at that point serving in the Israeli embassy in D.C. While even a pro-Israel lifer like Cranston had urged Israel to withdraw in the wake of the crime, a year later Biden said that “Israel’s presence in Lebanon is vitally important.”

Biden showered Israel with further rewards for its obstinacy. He again clashed with the Reagan White House over Israel policy, this time in December 1984, when he proposed giving Israel a generous Christmas present: a complete refinancing plan for what Israel owed to the US, then the largest per capita debt in the entire world, which was on top of an Israeli request for hundreds of millions dollars more in aid. The refinancing plan slashed the average interest rate on Israel’s US loans from the market rate of 12 percent to 5 percent.

He wasn’t getting nothing in return for these efforts. Due in part to his frequently making the rounds of pro-Israel fundraising dinners, Biden managed to easily out-raise his opponents during his failed 1988 presidential bid, raising $1.7 million in just twenty-seven days. By the time his campaign crashed and burned within three months, his national finance chairman claimed he had raised $3.7 million, with another $1 million on the way.

Biden’s ties to Israel lobbyists were key to this. The youth director of his 1988 campaign was a former AIPAC staffer, while one of his fundraisers sat on AIPAC’s national advisory council and had a hand in two pro-Israel PACs. His national finance chair got his start in political fundraising through AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups.

According to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Biden had been the pro-Israel lobby’s “anointed candidate” in the race, and after the election he continued to be among the top ten Senate recipients of money from pro-Israel PACs, receiving tens of thousands of dollars from them each year. By the end of his career in the Senate, Biden had received more than $410,700 from pro-Israel PACs and donors.

Biden also profited another way. Common Cause found that in 1987, Biden was the seventh-highest recipient of pro-Israel honoraria — cash payments from private groups for attending events like private meetings and seminars, or for delivering speeches. Honoraria not only ran around FEC regulations, but it could be used by candidates to pay their personal debts.

Biden would continue to receive pro-Israel cash and speak at pro-Israel events while carrying water for Israel in the Senate, in one case even taking part in AIPAC’s annual membership drive. At one such speech, he urged the audience to pressure lawmakers to make pro-Israel policy and said that Americans “cannot afford to publicly criticize Israel” because “Arabs make peace with Israel only when they realize they can’t drive a wedge between the US and Israel.”

Biden had an important function in the pro-Israel ecosystem. He and other liberal Israel hawks served as the reasonable, “good cop” alternatives to more fervent, right-wing voices, helping to sell Israel’s demands to those in power.

An episode from 1998 — in which Israel launched a public-relations and lobbying onslaught to stop Clinton from going public with a peace proposal to pressure then-prime minister Netanyahu from resurrecting the peace process — was illustrative. While a collection of right-wing hawks sent hard-line letters to Clinton and other lawmakers denouncing the plan, Biden and other liberals sent a gentler letter discouraging the idea. The two-pronged campaign worked and Clinton shelved the plan.

In some cases, however, Biden has veered far to the right when it comes to representing Israel’s interests in Congress. Twenty-three years before Trump caused chaos by moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, Biden voted for the law that allowed himto do so, arguing that “to do less would be to play into the hands of those who would … deny Israel the full attributes of statehood.” During the 2000s, when Israel started carrying out its policy of “targeted killings” — also known as assassinations — Biden insisted the extra-judicial killings were legal and even criticized the Bush administration for condemning them. In 2006, AIPAC specifically thanked Biden and three other lawmakers for helping pass a law that cut off US aid to the Palestinian Authority unless Hamas abided by certain conditions.

One would think these decades of closeness with the pro-Israel lobby, consistent devotion to Israeli interests, and friendship with Netanyahu would have paid dividends for Biden when he joined the Obama administration. He was, after all, “the best friend of Israel in the administration,” according to Chuck Schumer.

But not only did Netanyahu relentlessly work against the administration in which Biden served, ignoring Obama’s calls to stop settlement-building and attempting to kill the Iran deal, but he went out of his way to humiliate Biden, announcing a new spate of settlements while he was visiting the country. Biden in turn told Netanyahu that his actions were “getting dangerous” for the United States and its troops, a response that was less a sharp rebuke than a limp plea.

Nothing in Biden’s history suggests that he would use this current moment to break from business as usual on Israel. If anything, it suggests he may well work to shield Israel and its leadership from the wrath of an increasingly unhappy electorate.

Besides this, Biden has also proven himself a reliable supporter of an ever-expanding national security state during his time in Congress. He of course served as Obama’s vice president for eight years, when that administration dramatically widened the government’s powers in the name of national security. But long before this, Biden had an iffy track record on civil liberties.

Biden consistently supported legislation during his “tough on crime” decades that undermined core legal protections. The crime bill Biden started working on in 1993, for instance, would have codified the shrinking of prisoners’ rights to file habeas corpus petitions. Other bills supported by Biden allowed police to introduce illegally obtained evidence in court. (I’ll be covering Biden’s record on crime in greater depth in a future post.)

In 1991, Biden introduced no less than two bills aimed at curbing terrorism and crime respectively, both of which featured language mandating that tech companies create “back doors” in their products for law enforcement to snoop through.

Biden’s bill so alarmed one programmer, it spurred him to develop email encryption. Biden tried to water down encryption again three years later with a successful bill that expanded federal wiretap powers, but privacy advocates managed to remove this and other provisions from the bill before it passed.

The year after that, in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, Biden introduced the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act on behalf of the Clinton administration. The bill made “terrorism” a new federal crime, allowed those charged with terrorism to be automatically detained before trial, outlawed donations to government-designated terrorist groups, allowed electronic surveillance of suspected terrorists, and created a special court to deport noncitizens accused of terrorism (ironically, when Bush had proposed a similar measure years before, Biden had denounced it as “the very antithesis of our legal system”). It also let the government use evidence from secret sources in those trials.

With its mix of “discredited ideas from the Reagan and Bush Administrations” and “provisions eroding constitutional and statutory due process protections,” the Center for National Security Studies called it an “extension of some of the worst elements of crime bills of the recent past.”

The following year, Biden voted for Bob Dole’s Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which featured many of these provisions, as well as severely restricting federal habeas corpus review of court decisions: one appeal, with a one-year time limit. Legal scholar Lincoln Caplan called it “surely one of the worst statutes ever passed by Congress and signed into law,” and argued that it “gutted the federal writ of habeas corpus,” slashing the rate of state courts’ reversal of death penalty decisions by 40 percent.

Many of the provisions in Biden’s 1995 terrorism bill were revived six years later in the Patriot Act. In the wake of September 11, Biden incessantly told anyone who would listen that the Patriot Act — which quickly became shorthand for the Bush administration’s overreaching on terrorism — was in fact practically written by him.

During debate over the bill, Biden called it “measured and prudent,” and complained that the rest of the country had ignored his warnings about the dire threat of terrorism the previous decade. In fact, he lamented that the Patriot Act didn’t go further, regretting that measures allowing police to carry out forty-eight-hour emergency surveillance without a court order and letting them use accidentally illegally obtained wiretap evidence were removed.

Biden can also take partial credit for the militarization of domestic law enforcement. His championing of the “war on drugs,” of course, played a large role in this. Biden’s vote for the 1981 Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Officials Act, for instance, permitted the military to work with police on drug cases. But Biden was also a major proponent of the Byrne grant and Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) programs, which in practice created more heavily armed police forces increasingly focused on locking up people for minor drug crimes.

“You hear anybody say, any serious person say, that our investment in local law enforcement at a federal level over the last decade has been a failure?” Biden said to the National Sheriffs Association in 2005, as he griped about the Bush administration’s phase-out of COPS. He would later try and revive the programs.

When it wasn’t drugs, Biden used terrorism as a justification to militarize law enforcement. He inserted a provision into the Patriot Act that allowed state and local departments to apply to get equipment needed to combat terrorism. This was beside the extraordinary surveillance powers the law granted to police, which they now casually use for drug and immigration cases.

When Bush floated a review of the centuries-old law against the domestic use of the military in 2002 — about the same time he had considered sending troops into suburban Buffalo to arrest a group of suspected terrorists — Biden supported it, saying: “I think it is time to revisit it.”

A few years later, of course, when it was politically popular, Biden became a fierce critic of the surveillance state set up by the Bush administration, and he voted against expanding FISA in 2007 and 2008, the latter of which served as the legal basis for the NSA’s PRISM program.

Yet apart from this, Biden’s record shows him as an unreliable champion of civil liberties at best, riding whichever wave happens to be politically advantageous at the time. His ACLU scorecards suggest as much: during 2005 and 2006, Biden received a rare 100 percent rating based on his votes in six instances; in the years before and after, he received middling scores that were closer to “moderate” Republicans like Susan Collins

Which Biden will the world get should he be elected: the civil-liberties champion who briefly rebelled against Bush, or the eager anti-terror warrior who thought the Patriot Act could’ve gone further?

Out of Step

On several important issues, Biden has spent the vast bulk of his career out of step with the sentiments of not just the Democratic base, but, increasingly, the public as a whole. He’s been a proponent of an aggressive, if quietly interventionist, foreign policy, been one of Israel’s most reliable friends in Congress, and spent all but a brief period (when he was in opposition) expanding the national security state to outflank the Right.

There’s little reason to think Biden would usher in a break from the past when in power, particularly as (aside from Israel), these are issues that are inconsistent, even fleeting, in animating much of the public. The next nominee must be someone who truly believes in breaking from the national security consensus — not just someone who may grudgingly do it only if they’re forced.
 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
source: JACOBIN

Joe Biden, Neoliberal

Joe Biden proudly called himself a “Third Way” Democrat who hates “class warfare.” His forty-five-year political career shows how right he was.

It looks like Joe Biden is running. With Beltway insiders and Democratic bigwigs talking up his presidential chances, the former vice-president looks to be the candidate to beat in the 2020 primaries.

The only problem is, it’s Joe Biden. If you thought Hillary Clinton was a weak candidate, with her transactional style and triangulating policy stances, then you probably won’t be excited by Biden’s multi-decade history in the Senate.

Apart from Clinton’s inept campaigning and inability to connect with voters, Biden shares many of the same red flags that led a large share of the Democratic base to look with suspicion on the former secretary of state.

In this series, Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic takes a look back at the career of Delaware’s longtime senior senator. Below is Part III: Joe Biden, Neoliberal.

One of Joe Biden’s selling points is that he’s “good old Joe,” the affable, ordinary guy from hardscrabble Scranton, Pennsylvania, who, gee-whiz, found himself in the seat of global power and stayed there for five decades. He’s a “liberal everyman” who still has the common touch and will win back the working class with his “blue-collar roots.” It’s the basis for the hilarious series of Onion articles from the Obama years that portrayed Biden as a kind of aging Dukes of Hazzard character.

In fact, Biden’s portrayal by much of the media has a lot in common with the Onion’s “Diamond Joe” character in that neither is actually real. Biden’s blue-collar roots are genuine enough, but it’s been a long time since he was anything close to blue collar, even if his net worth pales in comparison to the ludicrous levels of wealth accrued by most other politicians.

More pertinently, during his career, Biden’s political work and the business ventures of his family have intersected more times than anyone who watched Hillary Clinton’s candidacy flame out over similar accusations should feel comfortable with. And for all his working-class affectations, Biden is exactly the kind of transactional, Third Way centrist the Clintons faced withering attacks for being, spending years attacking progressive “special interests” while crossing the aisle to vote with Republicans in major instances that were decidedly unhelpful to the working class.

In other words, at a time when both the Democratic party and the country are moving left — particularly on economic issues — Biden is a lingering fragment of the triangulating liberalism that was shattered by the 2016 election, and which helped bring us Trump in the first place.

Waist-Deep in the Swamp

Biden hasn’t (yet) made the mistake of setting up a global foundation that serves as the conduit for mountains of corporate and foreign-government cash in advance of his presidential run. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t had a history as a transactional politician.

The most well-known case is Biden’s relationship with MBNA, a major credit card company based in his home state that was his largest single donor between 1989 and 2000. By sheer coincidence, Biden voted against a measure requiring credit card companies to warn consumers of the consequences of making only minimum payments and voted four times for an industry-supported bankruptcy bill that made it harder for financially strained borrowers to get protection from creditors. Another coincidence: MBNA hired Biden’s son, Hunter, as a lobbyist straight out of law school, and later hired him as a consultant from 2001 to 2005 — the same years Biden was helping to pass the bill.

Biden’s son, incidentally, is the embodiment of the “swamp” that Trump spent 2016 bashing and subsequent years shamelessly wallowing in. After joining MBNA in 1996 and becoming its senior vice president two years later, Hunter started a lobbying firm with William Oldaker, who had worked as the elder Biden’s campaign treasurer and adviser. Along with Biden’s brother, Hunter was later accused in a lawsuit of defrauding a business partner in a hedge fund deal worth millions — a deal, the partner alleged, that only existed to get Hunter out of the lobbying industry so as not to cause headaches for Biden during his 2008 presidential campaign.

More recently, Ukraine’s biggest private gas producer hired Hunter to serve on its board at the same time his father was acting as the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine policy. There were several other reasons it wasn’t a great look. For one, the company’s owner was under investigation for corruption at just the same time Biden was traveling to Ukraine to urge a more aggressive stance toward corruption. Hunter’s hiring also mysteriously coincided with a lobbying campaign by the firm aimed at members of Congress.

Nor is Hunter’s case unique in the Biden family. According to a 2012 story that was curiously ignored by anyone other than conservative outlets, a mid-sized construction firm Hill International that won a $1.5 billion contract to build 100,000 homes in Iraq just happened to have Biden’s brother, James, as its executive vice president, despite his seemingly lacking any experience in residential construction prior to joining the firm. How did the company get the contract? It helped to have “the brother of the vice president as a partner,” the company’s president allegedly told a group of investors.

When Trump and the Right inevitably make hypocritical hay of these incidents, they’ll have plenty of other material to work with.

Biden has long been prolific on the speaking circuit. By 1979, he was one of the Senate’s top twenty-five earners of outside income — and, along with twenty-two others on that list, voted against a bill to limit such earnings. As early as 1977, his speaking-fee income was among the highest in the Senate, totaling $22,596 that year (almost $94,000 in today’s dollars) for a practice that even then was controversial. And while he did sponsor a bill that year to bar senators from taking such fees, he clearly wasn’t bothered by its failure, continuing to rack up thousands of dollars in fees from pro-Israel groups and others in the ensuing years, and commanding $100,000–$200,000 per speech today.

In 1985, Biden spoke to a gathering of the Democratic Business Council, a group of more than two hundred business executives who had given $10,000–$15,000 each to the Democratic National Committee. Because of the Vietnam War and the environmental movement, Biden told them, the Democrats “became basically a parched, fossilized version of what we were,” not “the party of the people, but the party of government.” But he assured the executives: “The good times are coming, and I mean that sincerely.”

And Biden wasn’t above providing those good times. In 1979, after receiving donations from Coca-Cola, Biden cosponsored and votedfor legislation that let the soft-drink industry get around antitrust laws. The same year, he voted against a measure before the Judiciary Committee to expand consumers’ rights to sue over price-fixing — one of only two Democrats to do so. As the Wall Street Journal reported, one of the companies lobbying against the bill, DuPont, was based in Biden’s home state.

Biden also spent years fighting off attempts to prohibit companies from filing for bankruptcy in states where they were incorporated but didn’t do business — a measure that would have hit the big fees racked up by law firms in Delaware, where many major companies are incorporated.

There’s also Biden’s history of close relationships to lobbyists. A number of Biden’s longtime staffers passed through the revolving door that led from Biden’s office to the lobbying industry — and back. He’s been known to attend weekend retreats with lobbyists, and from 1989 to 2008 the industry donated $344,400 to him, a little more than the $300,000 given by finance and credit card companies. Mega-lobbyist Gerald Cassidy says he and Biden are “good friends.”

In other words, Biden will be a sitting duck for exactly the sort of Republican attacks (however hypocritical) that helped sink Clinton’s campaign. More importantly, he would be just as compromised once in power.

“Clinton Got It Right”

This hints at the larger issue with Biden: at a time when left-wing populism is increasingly accepted as the antidote to Trump and the GOP’s nativist and corporate-friendly pitch, Biden stands as a remnant of precisely the sort of left-averse, triangulating Democratic politics that Hillary Clinton was relentlessly criticized for personifying.

If you don’t believe me, there’s someone else who can tell you all about it. His name is Joe Biden.

In 2001, Biden was specifically asked by the National Journal about whether or not he thought a “populist message” was an effective one. This was his response:


[Bill] Clinton got it right. I was one of those guys in 1987 who tried to run on a platform that Clinton basically ran on in 1992. And that is, for a lack of a better phrase, his “Third Way.” It worked. It’s where the American people are. It’s where the Democratic Party should have been. Al Gore abandoned it without an alternative, and [Sen.] Paul Wellstone [D-Minn.] thinks we lost because we didn’t take care of Ralph Nader’s voters. One of the things I’m most angry about in the [aftermath of the] 2000 election, we’re now renegotiating as a party what the hell our message should be and who we are, when for me it was settled in 1992 …. The idea now, and it’s credible, is that class warfare and populism is the way we should conduct the next election. We do that [and] George Bush will be a second term president, regardless of how bad a job he may do.

In fact, even in today’s political climate, Biden continues to defendthe ultrarich from criticism — “I don’t think five hundred billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble. The folks at the top aren’t bad guys,” he said last year — suggests his views haven’t shifted much in the last seventeen years.

Biden’s always been this guy. In 1984, Washington Post specifically named him, along with Gary Hart and Bill Bradley, as one of the best-known figures among that era’s Democratic Party “neo-liberals,” who “singled out slimming the role of government and pushing new technology,” supposedly to appeal to young people.

Biden built his career advertising himself as someone who refuses to toe the progressive line. He proudly boasted of defying liberal orthodoxy on school busing, for instance. But throughout his career, that boast has most often taken the form of bashing liberal “special interests.” Biden toured the country in 1985 chiding groups like unions and farmers for being too narrowly focused, and complained that Democrats too often “think in terms of special interests first and the greater interest second.” In the latter case, Biden was specifically complaining about their opposition to his calls for a spending freezeon entitlements and an increase in the retirement age.

“There is a lingering wariness toward Biden — a concern that he doesn’t like the [liberal] groups,” one lobbyist said in 2005. “He never wants to do press conferences with the groups.” One progressive activist in 1986 called him “abrasive” and charged that, on the subject of busing, he “lumps all civil rights and public interest lobbyists together as one special interest, and he wants so badly to be seen as not beholden to those interests.”

That also involved voting with Republicans in advance of reelection campaigns, as Biden did in 1995 when he backed a constitutional balanced-budget amendment, helping to hand the measure sixty-four of the sixty-seven votes it would have needed to be sent to the states for ratification. Biden had earlier criticized the amendment, saying it would “make Herbert Hoover’s economic policy a constitutional mandate,” before making an about-face. He’d been left with a choice between “an imperfect amendment or continued spending,” he explained.

Though Biden’s support wasn’t enough to pass one of the Right’s more calamitous ideas on that occasion, as president he would have four to eight years’ worth of opportunities to make such compromises. He did, after all, vote for NAFTA, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, and Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform, which, together with his crime bill, further devastated poor, mostly black families. More recently he backed the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. The fact that even today Biden continues to insist that the public stop vilifying the world’s billionaires shows the Biden of 2018 is little different from the Biden who spent decades scolding the Democratic base and bragging that he wasn’t a progressive.

If Biden can’t even bring himself to pay lip service to populist rhetoric in this historical moment, it’s not hard to tell how he’d govern when he isn’t trying to win an election.
 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
source: New York Times

Joe Biden Argued for Delaying Supreme Court Picks in 1992


Joseph R. Biden, while a senator in 1992, said that if a Supreme Court vacancy occurred, President George Bush should not appoint a nominee until after the election, or should compromise on a nominee with the Senate.

WASHINGTON — As a senator more than two decades ago, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. argued that President George Bush should delay filling a Supreme Court vacancy, should one arise, until the presidential election was over, and that it was “essential” that the Senate refuse to confirm a nominee to the court until then.

Mr. Biden’s words, though uttered long ago, are a direct contradiction to President Obama’s position in the battle over naming a successor to Justice Antonin Scalia.

Mr. Obama has said it is his constitutional responsibility to name a successor to Justice Scalia, who died Feb. 13 at the age of 79. The president has reacted with incredulity to the suggestion by several Republican presidential candidates and senators, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, that the decision should wait until after Mr. Obama has left office.

“Historically, this has not been viewed as a question,” Mr. Obama said last week. “There’s no unwritten law that says that it can only be done on off years — that’s not in the constitutional text.”

But in a speech on the Senate floor in June 1992, Mr. Biden, then the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said there should be a different standard for a Supreme Court vacancy “that would occur in the full throes of an election year.” The president should follow the example of “a majority of his predecessors” and delay naming a replacement, Mr. Biden said. If he goes forward before then, the Senate should wait to consider the nomination.

“Some will criticize such a decision and say that it was nothing more than an attempt to save a seat on the court in hopes that a Democrat will be permitted to fill it, but that would not be our intention,” Mr. Biden said at the time. “It would be our pragmatic conclusion that once the political season is underway, and it is, action on a Supreme Court nomination must be put off until after the election campaign is over.

“That is what is fair to the nominee and essential to the process. Otherwise, it seems to me,” he added, “we will be in deep trouble as an institution.”

23biden-web-jumbo.jpg

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the chairman of the Judiciary committee, with Ruth Bader Ginsburg in June 1993. She was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton in August 1993.

Mr. Biden’s speech came to light on Monday as the White House said Mr. Obama was poring through a thick binder of potential nominees, with an eye toward deciding on his pick within weeks. It quickly became fodder for Republicans who have suggested that the president should wait to name a successor to Justice Scalia, or that the Senate should delay considering one.

Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and the current chairman of the Judiciary Committee, recited portions of Mr. Biden’s speech in his own address from the Senate floor on Monday, calling the points that the vice president had laid out “Biden Rules” and saying his point had been: “It’s the principle that matters, not the person.”

“If the president of the United States insists on submitting a nominee under these circumstances, Senator Biden, my friend from Delaware, the man who sat at a desk across the aisle and at the back of this chamber for more than 35 years, knows what the Senate should do,” Mr. Grassley said. “And, I believe, in his heart of hearts, he understands why it must.”

Mr. Biden’s remarks were part of a long speech about revising the Supreme Court confirmation process after a tumultuous five-year period that had featured three bitterly contested nominees: William H. Rehnquist in 1986, who received the most “no” votes of any justice until that time; Robert H. Bork, who was rejected by the Senate in 1987; and Clarence Thomas, whose bruising hearings culminated in a vote in 1991 in which he drew even more opposition than Chief Justice Rehnquist had.

“In all likelihood,” Mr. Biden said at the time, “we stand at only the halfway point in the remaking of the Supreme Court, with as many confirmation controversies in the coming presidential term as we saw over the past two terms combined.”

Hours after archival C-Span video clips of the speech began circulating, Mr. Biden issued a statement saying that his remarks had been misinterpreted, and stressing that he believed, then and now, that the White House and Congress should “work together to overcome partisan differences” on Supreme Court nominations. He had a record of moving such candidates during his time as chairman of the judiciary panel, he said.

“Some critics say that one excerpt of my speech is evidence that I oppose filling a Supreme Court vacancy in an election year,” Mr. Biden said. “This is not an accurate description of my views on the subject.”

Officials at the White House and on Capitol Hill noted that Mr. Biden had also said in the 1992 speech that he would support a future Supreme Court nominee by Mr. Bush as long as the president consulted with the Senate or chose a moderate. Mr. Biden made that observation as he discussed how the confirmation process could be changed “in the next administration,” should he remain as chairman.
 
Last edited:

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
source: Mother Jones

One Big Thing Those Rumors About a Joe Biden-Stacey Abrams Ticket Miss: Anita Hill

The Democratic star hasn’t forgotten the Clarence Thomas spectacle.

062818_abrams.jpg



The internet is buzzing with speculation that former Vice President Joe Biden will soon announce his presidential candidacy and tap rising Democratic star Stacey Abrams to be his running mate, as suggested by a CNN report earlier this week and stated a bit more explicitly in an Axiosstory Thursday. Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine thinks it’s a “brilliant idea.” Eric Lutz at Vanity Fair thinks the ticket could “save Biden from himself.” But there are a few things curiously missing from the mix, namely Abrams herself and what she thinks of this plan—and, more importantly, what she thinks of Biden.

Abrams’ historic but unsuccessful gubernatorial run in Georgia last year overlapped with the rise of the #MeToo movement, and when asked in a recent interview with Marie Claire if she had her own story to share, Abrams pointed to Anita Hill. She explained how formative it was to watch Hill be grilled about sexual harassment by an all-white male panel of senators, led by the one and only Joe Biden, then the senator from Delaware and chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“I remember the Anita Hill hearings vividly, watching those men in power deny her humanity,” Abrams told the magazine. “So to see women in this moment—especially in light of who occupies the White House—refuse to be dissuaded from demanding their equality, agency, and equity is a testament to the resilience we possess.”

Abrams was a freshman at Spelman College in Atlanta in October 1991 when Hill, then an unknown former employee of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that she had been sexually harassed by Clarence Thomas, George Bush’s pick to replace Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court.

Abrams was an activist on campus. In 1992, she was photographed with a group of students burning the Georgia state flag, which at the time included a not-so-subtle nod to the Confederacy:




Later, when administrators closed the campus to quell protests in the aftermath of the videotaped beating of Rodney King, Abrams organized students to call local TV and radio stations to get out their perspective, and the campaign even led to her having a tense showdown with then-Mayor Maynard Jackson.

While it’s unclear if Abrams was involved in any activism surrounding the Thomas hearings, it seems just the kind of thing that would have sparked a fire for her at the time. And while Biden’s questions weren’t the worst of the panel—Sen. Howell Heflin, a Democrat from Alabama, probably deserves a top spot there when he asked, “Are you a scorned woman? Do you have a militant attitude relative to the area of Civil Rights?”—as committee chair, he didn’t do much to blunt the attacks that came Hill’s way, and he also failed to call witnesses who could have supported Hill’s allegations. Hill isn’t holding her breath for an apology, but Biden has expressed some regret publicly about how he handled the whole ordeal, telling NBC in 2018: “Anita Hill was vilified when she came forward by a lot of my colleagues. I wish I could have done more to prevent those questions and the way they asked them.”



What’s more, Abrams has risen to national prominence by proudly embracing her identity as a black woman—her natural hair, her gap-toothed smile, her self-described “sturdy” build. She grew up working-class and isn’t married, and has become something of a model for women of color who want to build a political profile based on authenticity and an explicit rejection of norms that often center on white men. She ran a gubernatorial campaign in Georgia that upended traditional electioneering; she ran Spanish-language ads, held forums with LGBT communities, and wound up tripling turnout for Asian-American and Latino voters, while turning out more black voters than the sum total of Democratic voters who went to the polls in Georgia in 2014. She wowed the country with her State of the Union response and even earned praise from Fox News pundits. It makes sense that every Democratic presidential hopeful is courting her in some capacity.

But with Biden, it’s hard not to wonder if the feeling is mutual. We won’t really know until Abrams says something herself to either confirm or deny speculation about her future as a VP, or even as a presidential candidate herself. And, after all, she didn’t mention Biden by name to Marie Claire. But given how she’s built her national profile, and how the years of her college activism seem to have shaped her, it’s hard to believe that Abrams wouldn’t consider the complicated optics of teaming up with Biden.
 

MCP

International
International Member
Joe Biden Is Hillary Clinton 2.0 — Democrats Would Be Mad to Nominate Him

AP_19071550285604-JoeBiden-Politics-1552592861.jpg

Former Vice President Joe Biden waves after speaking at the International Association of Firefighters on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on March 12, 2019.

Photo: Andrew Harnik/AP

https://theintercept.com/2019/03/21/joe-biden-2020-hillary-clinton/

“The definition of insanity,” Einstein didn’t say, “is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”

Have the Democrats gone mad? Are they really planning on putting up the same type of candidate against Donald Trump in 2020 that they put up against him in 2016? Is the party bent on nominating Hillary 2.0?

How else to describe Joe Biden, the former vice president and ex-senator from Delaware, who is leading in the polls and has hinted that he’d reveal whether he’s running for president in “a few weeks” and might select a running mate early in the process?

Forget, for a moment, his “blue-collar-uncle-at-the-end-of-the-bar persona.” Ignore also his recent, and ridiculous, claim to have the “most progressive record of anybody” running for president. Consider, instead, the sheer number of similarities he seems to have with the vanquished Democratic presidential candidate of 2016.

Iraq War supporter? Check. Clinton was pilloried by the left and the right alike as a wild-eyed hawk; her vote in favor of the Iraq invasion haunted both her 2008 and 2016 campaigns. In fact, a study by two academics in 2017 found a “significant and meaningful relationship between a community’s rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump” and suggested that if Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin “had suffered even a modestly lower casualty rate,” they could have “sent Hillary Clinton to the White House.”

Let’s be clear: If he runs, Biden will be the only candidate — out of up to 20 Democrats running for the nomination — to have voted for the Iraq War. As the influential chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the run-up to the invasion, Biden (falsely) claimed the United States had “no choice but to eliminate the threat” from Saddam Hussein. A former U.N. weapons inspector even accused the then-senator of running a “sham” committee hearing that provided “political cover for a massive military attack on Iraq.”

Friend of Wall Street? Check. Clinton had a Goldman Sachs problem; Biden has an MBNA problem. Headquartered in his home state of Delaware, the credit card giant MBNA was his biggest donor when he served in the Senate. In 2005, Biden threw his weight behind a bankruptcy bill, signed into law by President George W. Bush, that shamefully protected credit card companies at the expense of borrowers.

National Review later dubbed Biden “the senator from MBNA”. The then-senator’s son Hunter even went to work for the company while his father was pushing through the bankruptcy bill. There’s a word for that, right? Trumpian.

As in 2016, Sen. Bernie Sanders will be bashing the banks again in the run-up to 2020; as in 2016, his fellow frontrunner will be defending them. “I love Bernie, but I’m not Bernie Sanders,” Biden confirmed in a speech in May 2018. “I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble. The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.”

Champion of mass incarceration? Check. Clinton took flak for supporting the 1994 crime bill, which helped push up the U.S. prison population, introduced new federal death penalty crimes, and hugely exacerbated racial disparities in the criminal justice system. And Biden? Well, he wrote the damn thing!

Remember how Clinton’s loathsome defense of the 1994 bill came back to bite her in 2016? “They are not just gangs of kids anymore,” she said. “They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘superpredators.’ … We have to bring them to heel.”

You don’t think Biden’s decadeslong “tough on crime” rhetoric will hurt him too? Especially with minority voters? “One of my objectives, quite frankly, is to lock Willie Horton up in jail,” he declared in 1990, as Senate Judiciary Committee chair.

“I don’t care why someone is a malefactor in society,” Biden said in 1993, as he mocked “wacko Democrats” for trying to understand the causes of crime. “I don’t care why someone is antisocial. I don’t care why they’ve become a sociopath. We have an obligation to cordon them off from the rest of society.”

“My greatest accomplishment is the 1994 Crime Bill,” he told the National Sheriffs’ Association in 2007.

Millions of black voters refused to turn out for Clinton in 2016. Why wouldn’t they do the same in response to a Biden candidacy in 2020?

Establishment-friendly? Check. The Clintons arrived in Washington, D.C., in 1993; Clinton then spent eight years in the Senate and four years in Barack Obama’s cabinet. Biden arrived in D.C. in 1973; he spent 36 years in the Senate and eight years in Obama’s cabinet.

When Trump tries to run again as an anti-establishment outsider in 2020, what will Biden’s response be? And will grassroots Democrats rally behind a candidate who befriended and defended notorious segregationist Strom Thurmond, and whose allies brag that he is a “a guy who actually gets along with Mitch McConnell and a number of other Republicans”? This is supposed to be a selling point?

Gaffe-prone? Check. You think the “deplorables” line from Clinton was bad? Did you cringe at “Pokemon Go to the polls”? The former vice president has a long list of excruciating “Bidenisms.” Remember when he asked a state senator in a wheelchair to “stand up … let ’em see ya”? Or when he told a largely African-American audience that Mitt Romney was “going to put y’all back in chains”? Or when he said, “You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent”? I could go on. And on. And on. (And don’t even get me started on the “Creepy Joe Biden” videos …)

Why nominate a candidate for president who’ll make Trump look … what’s the word … normal?

Loser? Check. Clinton won the Democratic nomination in 2016, at the second attempt, having been defeated by Obama eight years earlier. For Biden, it would have to be third-time lucky. His supporters might not want you to remember this, but he has run for president twice already: In 1987, he quit the Democratic primary race within three months of announcing after being accused of plagiarizing parts of his speech. In 2008, he dropped out after coming fifth in the Iowa caucus, winning less than 1 percent of the vote.

Yet now, it seems, he and his supporters believe this serial loser is the only Democratic candidate able to win back white-working class voters from Trump and triumph in the 2020 presidential election?

Where is the actual evidence for this ludicrous claim? For a start, a recent poll found that “every potential Democratic candidate in the 2020 presidential election — announced and unannounced — would beat President Trump in a head-to-head contest.” (As Biden himself conceded to The Intercept in December, “I think anybody can beat him.”)

The bigger issue, however, is that there is no question for the Democrats in 2020 to which Biden is the answer. Have they really learned no lessons from three years ago?
 

muckraker10021

Superstar *****
BGOL Investor
For the very, very, very, very, few of you peeps who read anything longer than 300 words.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Joe Biden claims "I have the most progressive record of anybody running" for president.

HE FUCKING LIED!
and any so-called "centrist - moderate" 2020 Presidential candidate will guarantee that Drumpf will remain in the presidency for another 4 more years.


JOE-BIDEN-Harpers-Magazine-2019-03-0087402-1.jpg


NO Joe!
Biden's Disastrous Legislative Legacy!


by Andrew Cockburn | March 2019 | https://harpers.org/archive/2019/03/joe-biden-record/

In the heart of the US Capitol there’s a small men’s room with an uplifting Franklin Delano Roosevelt quotation above the door. Making use of the facilities there after lunch in the nearby House dining room about a year ago, I found myself standing next to Trent Lott. Once a mighty power in the building as Senate Republican leader, he had been forced to resign his post following some imprudently affectionate references to his fellow Republican senator, arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond. Now he was visiting the Capitol as a lucratively employed lobbyist.

The bathroom in which we stood, Lott remarked affably, once served a higher purpose. History had been made there. “When I first came to Washington as a junior staffer in 1968,” he explained, “this was the private hideaway office of Bill Colmer, chairman of the House Rules Committee.” Colmer, a long-serving Mississippi Democrat and Lott’s boss, was an influential figure. The committee he ruled controlled whether bills lived or died, the latter being the customary fate of proposed civil-rights legislation that reached his desk. “On Thursday nights,” Lott continued, “he and members of the leadership from both sides of the House would meet here to smoke cigars, drink cheap bourbon, play gin rummy, and discuss business. There was a chemistry, they understood each other. It was a magical thing.” He sighed wistfully at the memory of a more harmonious age, in which our elders and betters could arrange the nation’s affairs behind closed doors.

I don’t know that Joe Biden, currently leading the polls for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, ever frequented that particular restroom, in either its bygone or contemporary manifestation, but it could serve as a fitting shrine to all that he stands for. Biden has long served as high priest of the doctrine that our legislative problems derive merely from superficial disagreements, rather than fundamental differences over matters of principle. “I believe that we have to end the divisive partisan politics that is ripping this country apart,” he declared in the Rose Garden in 2015, renouncing a much-anticipated White House run. “It’s mean-spirited. It’s petty. And it’s gone on for much too long. I don’t believe, like some do, that it’s naïve to talk to Republicans. I don’t think we should look on Republicans as our enemies.”

Given his success in early polling, it would seem that this message resonates with many voters, at least when they are talking to pollsters. After all, according to orthodox wisdom, there is no more commendable virtue in American political custom and practice than bipartisanship. Politicians on the stump fervently assure voters that they will strive with every sinew to “work across the aisle” to deliver “commonsense solutions,” and those who express the sentiment eloquently can expect widespread approval. Barack Obama famously launched himself toward the White House with his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention proclaiming that there is “not a liberal America and a conservative America,” only a “United States of America.”

By tapping into these popular tropes—“The system is broken,” “Why can’t Congress just get along?”—the practitioners of bipartisanship conveniently gloss over the more evident reality: that the system is under sustained assault by an ideology bent on destroying the remnants of the New Deal to the benefit of a greed-driven oligarchy. It was bipartisan accord, after all, that brought us the permanent war economy, the war on drugs, the mass incarceration of black people, 1990s welfare “reform,” Wall Street deregulation and the consequent $16 trillion in bank bailouts, the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, and other atrocities too numerous to mention. If the system is indeed broken, it is because interested parties are doing their best to break it.

Rather than admit this, Biden has long found it more profitable to assert that political divisions can be settled by men endowed with statesmanlike vision and goodwill—in other words, men such as himself. His frequent eulogies for public figures have tended to play heavily on this theme. Thus his memorial speech for Republican standard-bearer John McCain dwelled predictably on the cross-party nature of their relationship, beginning with his opening: “My name is Joe Biden. I’m a Democrat, and I loved John McCain.” Continuing in that vein, he related how he and McCain had once been chided by their respective party leaderships for spending so much time in each other’s company on the Senate floor, and referred fondly to the days when senators Teddy Kennedy and James Eastland, the latter a die-hard racist and ruthless suppressor of civil-rights bills, would “fight like hell on civil rights and then go have lunch together, down in the Senate dining room.”

Clearly, there is merit in the ability to craft compromise between opposing viewpoints in order to produce an effective result. John Ritch, formerly a US ambassador and top aide on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, worked closely with Biden for two decades, and has nothing but praise for his negotiating skills. “I’ve never seen anyone better at presiding over a group of politicians who represent conflicting egos and interests and using a combination of conciliation, humor, and muscle to cajole them into an agreed way forward,” Ritch told me recently. “Joe Biden has learned the skills to get things done in Washington. And I’ve seen him apply it equally with foreign leaders.”

The value of compromise, however, depends on what result is produced, and who benefits thereby. McCain’s record had at least a few commendable features, such as his opposition to torture (though never, of course, war). But it is hard to find much admirable in the character of a tireless defender of institutional racism like Strom Thurmond. Hence, Trent Lott’s words of praise—regretting that the old racist had lost when he ran as a Dixiecrat in the 1948 presidential election—had been deemed terminally unacceptable.

It fell to Biden to highlight some redeeming qualities when called on, inevitably, to deliver Thurmond’s eulogy following the latter’s death in 2003 at the age of one hundred. Biden reminisced with affection about the unlikely friendship between the deceased and himself. Despite having arrived at the Senate at age twenty-nine “emboldened, angered, and outraged about the treatment of African Americans in this country,” he said, he nevertheless found common cause on important issues with the late senator from South Carolina, who had been wont to describe civil-rights activists as “red pawns and publicity seekers.”
One such issue, as Branko Marcetic has pitilessly chronicled in Jacobin, was a shared opposition to federally mandated busing in the effort to integrate schools, an opposition Biden predicted would be ultimately adopted by liberal holdouts. “The black community justifiably is jittery,” Biden admitted to the Washington Post in 1975 with regard to his position. “I’ve made it—if not respectable—I’ve made it reasonable for longstanding liberals to begin to raise the questions I’ve been the first to raise in the liberal community here on the [Senate] floor.”

Biden was responding to criticism of legislation he had introduced that effectively barred the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from compelling communities to bus pupils using federal funds. This amendment was meant to be an alternative to a more extreme proposal put forward by a friend of Biden’s, hall-of-fame racist Jesse Helms (Biden had initially supported Helms’s version). Nevertheless, the Washington Post described Biden’s amendment as “denying the possibility for equal educational opportunities to minority youngsters trapped in ill-equipped inner-city schools.” Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, then the sole African-American senator, called Biden’s measure “the greatest symbolic defeat for civil rights since 1964.”

027__HA0319_27-2.png

President Bill Clinton hugs Senator Joe Biden after signing the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act


By the 1980s, Biden had begun to see political gold in the harsh antidrug legislation that had been pioneered by drug warriors such as Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon, and would ultimately lead to the age of mass incarceration for black Americans. One of his Senate staffers at the time recalls him remarking, “Whenever people hear the words ‘drugs’ and ‘crime,’ I want them to think ‘Joe Biden.’” Insisting on anonymity, this former staffer recollected how Biden’s team “had to think up excuses for new hearings on drugs and crime every week—any connection, no matter how remote. He wanted cops at every public meeting—you’d have thought he was running for chief of police.”

The ensuing legislation might also have brought to voters’ minds the name of the venerable Thurmond, Biden’s partner in this effort. Together, the pair sponsored the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act, which, among other repressive measures, abolished parole for federal prisoners and cut the amount of time by which sentences could be reduced for good behavior. The bipartisan duo also joined hands to cheerlead the passage of the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act and its 1988 follow-on, which cumulatively introduced mandatory sentences for drug possession. Biden later took pride in reminding audiences that “through the leadership of Senator Thurmond, and myself, and others,” Congress had passed a law mandating a five-year sentence, with no parole, for anyone caught with a piece of crack cocaine “no bigger than [a] quarter.” That is, they created the infamous disparity in penalties between those caught with powder cocaine (white people) and those carrying crack (black people). Biden also unblushingly cited his and Thurmond’s leading role in enacting laws allowing for the execution of drug dealers convicted of homicide, and expanding the practice of civil asset forfeiture, law enforcement’s plunder of property belonging to people suspected of crimes, even if they are neither charged nor convicted.

Despite pleas from the NAACP and the ACLU, the 1990s brought no relief from Biden’s crime crusade. He vied with the first Bush Administration to introduce ever more draconian laws, including one proposing to expand the number of offenses for which the death penalty would be permitted to fifty-one. Bill Clinton quickly became a reliable ally upon his 1992 election, and Biden encouraged him to “maintain crime as a Democratic initiative” with suitably tough legislation. The ensuing 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, passed with enthusiastic administration pressure, would consign millions of black Americans to a life behind bars.

In subsequent years, as his crime legislation, particularly on mandatory sentences, attracted efforts at reform, Biden began expressing a certain remorse. “I am part of the problem that I have been trying to solve since then, because I think the disparity [between crack and powder cocaine sentences] is way out of line,” he declared at a Senate hearing in 2008. However, there is little indication that his words were matched by actions, especially after he moved to the vice presidency the following year. The executive director of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, Eric Sterling, who worked on the original legislation in the House as a congressional counsel, told me, “During the eight years he was vice president, I never saw him take a leadership role in the area of drug policy, never saw him get out in front on the issue like he did on same-sex marriage, for example. Biden could have taken a stronger line [with Obama] privately or publicly, and he did not.”

While many black Americans will neither forgive nor forget how they, along with relatives and friends, were accorded the lifetime stigma of a felony conviction, many other Americans are only now beginning to count the costs of these viciously repressive initiatives. As a result, criminal justice reform has emerged as a popular issue across the political spectrum, including among conservatives eager to burnish otherwise illiberal credentials. Ironically, this has led, in theory, to a modest unraveling of a portion of Biden’s bipartisan crime-fighting legacy.

Last December, as Donald Trump’s erratic regime was falling into increasing disarray, the political-media class briefly united in celebration of an exercise in bipartisanship: the First Step Act. Billed as a long overdue overhaul of the criminal justice system, the legislation received rapturous reviews for its display of cross-party cooperation, headlined by Jared Kushner’s partnership with liberal talk-show host Van Jones. In truth, this was a very modest first step. It offered the possibility of release to some 2,600 federal inmates, whose relief from excessive sentences would require the goodwill of both prosecutors and police, as well as forbidding some especially barbaric practices in federal prisons, such as the shackling of pregnant inmates. Overall, it amounted to little more than a textbook exercise in aisle bridging, a triumph of form over substance.

In the near term, it’s unlikely that there will be further bipartisan attempts to chip away at Biden’s legislative legacy, a legacy that includes an inconsistent (to put it mildly) record on abortion rights. Roe v. Wade “went too far,” he told an interviewer in 1974. “I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.” For some years his votes were consistent with that view. He supported the notorious Hyde Amendment prohibiting any and all federal funding for abortions, and fathered the “Biden Amendment” that banned the use of US foreign aid for abortion research.

As the 1980s wore on, however, and Biden’s presidential ambitions started to swell, he began to cast fewer antiabortion votes (with some exceptions), and led the potent opposition to Judge Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Then came Clarence Thomas. Even before Anita Hill reluctantly surfaced with her convincing recollections of unpleasant encounters with the porn-obsessed judge, Biden was fumbling his momentous responsibility of directing the hearings. As Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson report in Strange Justice, their book about the Thomas nomination battle, Biden’s questions were “sometimes so long and convoluted that Thomas would forget what the question was.” Biden prided himself on his legal scholarship, Mayer and Abramson suggest, and thus his questions were often designed “to show off [his] legal acumen rather than to elicit answers.”

More damningly, Biden not only allowed fellow committee members to mount a sustained barrage of vicious attacks on Hill: he wrapped up the hearings without calling at least two potential witnesses who could have convincingly corroborated Hill’s testimony and, by extension, indicated that the nominee had perjured himself on a sustained basis throughout the hearings. As Mayer and Abramson write, “Hill’s reputation was not foremost among the committee’s worries. The Democrats in general, and Biden in particular, appear to have been far more concerned with their own reputations,” and feared a Republican-stoked public backlash if they aired more details of Thomas’s sexual proclivities. Hill was therefore thrown to the wolves, and America was saddled with a Supreme Court justice of limited legal qualifications and extreme right-wing views (which he had taken pains to deny while under oath).

Fifteen years later, Biden would repeat this exercise in hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel Alito, yet another grim product of the Republican judicial-selection machinery. True to form, in his opening round of questions, Biden droned on for the better part of half an hour, allowing Alito barely five minutes to explain his views. As the torrent of verbiage washed over the hearing room, fellow Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy could only glower at Biden in impotent frustration.

Biden’s record on race and women did him little damage with the voters of Delaware, who regularly returned him to the Senate with comfortable margins. On race, at least, Biden affected to believe that Delawareans’ views might be closer to those of his old buddy Thurmond than those of the “Northeast liberal” he sometimes claimed to be. “You don’t know my state,” he told Fox as he geared up for his second attempt on the White House in 2006.* “My state was a slave state. My state is a border state. My state has the eighth-largest black population in the country. My state is anything [but] a Northeast liberal state.” Months later, in front of a largely Republican audience in South Carolina, he joked that the only reason Delaware had fought with the North in the Civil War was “because we couldn’t figure out how to get to the South. There were a couple of states in the way.”

Whether or not most Delawareans are proud of their slaveholding history, there are some causes that they, or at least the dominant power brokers in the state, hold especially dear. Foremost among them is Delaware’s status as a freewheeling tax haven. State laws have made Delaware the domicile of choice for corporations, especially banks, and it competes for business with more notorious entrepôts such as the Cayman Islands. Over half of all US public companies are legally headquartered there.

“It’s a corporate whore state, of course,” the anonymous former Biden staffer remarked to me offhandedly in a recent conversation. He stressed that in “a small state with thirty-five thousand bank employees, apart from all the lawyers and others from the financial industry,” Biden was never going to stray too far from the industry’s priorities. We were discussing bankruptcy, an issue that has highlighted Biden’s fealty to the banks. Unsurprisingly, Biden was long a willing foot soldier in the campaign to emasculate laws allowing debtors relief from loans they cannot repay. As far back as 1978, he helped negotiate a deal rolling back bankruptcy protections for graduates with federal student loans, and in 1984 worked to do the same for borrowers with loans for vocational schools. Even when the ostensible objective lay elsewhere, such as drug-related crime, Biden did not forget his banker friends. Thus the 1990 Crime Control Act, with Biden as chief sponsor, further limited debtors’ ability to take advantage of bankruptcy protections.

These initiatives, however, were only precursors to the finance lobby’s magnum opus: the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act. This carefully crafted flail of the poor made it almost impossible for borrowers to get traditional “clean slate” Chapter 7 bankruptcy, under which debt forgiveness enables people to rebuild their lives and businesses. Instead, the law subjected them to the far harsher provisions of Chapter 13, effectively turning borrowers into indentured servants of institutions like the credit card companies headquartered in Delaware. It made its way onto the statute books after a lopsided 74–25 vote (bipartisanship!), with Biden, naturally, voting in favor.

It was, in fact, the second version of the bill. An earlier iteration had passed Congress in 2000 with Biden’s support, but President Clinton refused to sign it at the urging of the first lady, who had been briefed on its iniquities by Elizabeth Warren. A Harvard Law School professor at the time, Warren witheringly summarized Biden’s advocacy of the earlier bill in a 2002 paper:

His energetic work on behalf of the credit card companies has earned him the affection of the banking industry and protected him from any well-funded challengers for his Senate seat.
Furthermore, she added tartly, “This important part of Senator Biden’s legislative work also appears to be missing from his Web site and publicity releases.” No doubt coincidentally, the credit card giant MBNA was Biden’s largest contributor for much of his Senate career, while also employing his son Hunter as an executive and, later, as a well-remunerated consultant.
It should go without saying, then, that Biden was among the ninety senators on one of the fatal (to the rest of us) legislative gifts presented to Wall Street back in the Clinton era: the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act of 1999. The act repealed the hallowed Depression-era Glass–Steagall legislation that severed investment banking from commercial banking, thereby permitting the combined operations to gamble with depositors’ money, and ultimately ushering in the 2008 crash. “The worst vote I ever cast in my entire time in the United States Senate,” admitted Biden in December 2016, as he prepared to leave office. Seventeen years too late, he explained that the act had “allowed banks with deposits to take on risky investments, putting the whole system at risk.”

In the meantime, of course, he had been vice president of the United States for eight years, and thus in a position to address the consequences of his (and his fellow senators’) actions by using his power to press for criminal investigations. His longtime faithful aide, Ted Kaufman, in fact, had taken over his Senate seat and was urging such probes. Yet there is not the slightest sign that Biden used his influence to encourage pursuit of the financial fraudsters. As he opined in a 2018 talk at the Brookings Institution, “I don’t think five hundred billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble. The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.” Characteristically, he described gross inequalities in wealth mainly as a threat to bipartisanship: “This gap is yawning, and it’s having the effect of pulling us apart. You see the politics of it.”

Biden’s rightward bipartisan inclinations are not the only source of his alleged appeal. In an imitation of Hillary Clinton’s tactics in the lead-up to the 2016 election, Biden has advertised himself as the candidate of “experience.” Indeed, in his self-estimation he is the “most qualified person in the country to be president.” It’s a claim mainly rooted in foreign policy, a field where, theoretically, partisan politics are deposited at the water’s edge and Biden’s negotiating talents and expertise are seen to their best advantage.

He boasts the same potent acquaintances with world leaders that helped earn Clinton a similar “most qualified” label on her failed presidential job application and, like her, has been a reliable hawk, not least when occupying the high-profile chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. An ardent proponent of NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, an ill-conceived initiative that has served as an enduring provocation of Russian hostility toward the West, Biden voted enthusiastically to authorize Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, was a major proponent of Clinton’s war in Kosovo, and pushed for military intervention in Sudan.
Presumably in deference to this record, Obama entrusted his vice president with a number of foreign policy tasks over the years, beginning with “quarterbacking,” as Biden put it, US relations with Iraq. “Joe will do Iraq,” the president told his foreign policy team a few weeks after being sworn in. “He knows it, he knows the players.” It proved to be an unfortunate choice, at least for Iraqis. In 2006, the US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, had selected Nouri al-Maliki, a relatively obscure Shiite politician, to be the country’s prime minister. “Are you serious?” exclaimed a startled Maliki when Khalilzad informed him of the decision. But Maliki proved to be a determinedly sectarian ruler, persecuting the Sunni tribes that had switched sides to aid US forces during the so-called surge of 2007–08. In addition, he sparked widespread allegations of corruption. According to the Iraqi Commission of Integrity set up after his departure, as much as $500 billion was siphoned off from government coffers during Maliki’s eight years in power.

In the 2010 parliamentary elections, one of Maliki’s rivals, boasting a nonsectarian base of support, won the most seats, though not a majority. According to present and former Iraqi officials, Biden’s emissaries pressed hard to assemble a coalition that would reinstall Maliki as prime minister. “It was clear they were not interested in anyone else,” one Iraqi diplomat told me. “Biden himself was very scrappy—he wouldn’t listen to argument.” The consequences were, in the official’s words, “disastrous.” In keeping with the general corruption of his regime, Maliki allowed the country’s security forces to deteriorate. Command of an army division could be purchased for $2 million, whereupon the buyer might recoup his investment with exactions from the civilian population. Therefore, when the Islamic State erupted out of Syria and moved against major Iraqi cities, there were no effective defenses. With Islamic State fighters an hour’s drive from Baghdad, the United States belatedly rushed to push Maliki aside and install a more competent leader, the Shiite politician and former government minister Haider al-Abadi. (Biden’s camp disputed the Iraqi official’s assertion that the United States pressed for Maliki in 2010. “We had no brief for any individual,” said Tony Blinken, who served as Biden’s national security adviser at the time.)

Biden devotes considerable space to this episode in Promise Me, Dad, his political and personal memoir documenting the year in which his son Beau slowly succumbed to cancer. But although we learn much about Biden’s relationship with Abadi, and the key role he played in getting vital help to the beleaguered Iraqi regime, there is little indication of his past with Maliki aside from a glancing reference to “stubbornly sectarian policies.”

Promise Me, Dad also covers Biden’s involvement in the other countries allotted to him by President Obama: Ukraine, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Anyone seeking insight from the book into the recent history of these regions, or of actual US policy and actions there, should look elsewhere. He has little to say, for example, about the well-chronicled involvement of US officials in the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014, still less on whether he himself was involved. He records his strenuous efforts to funnel IMF loans to the country following anti-corruption measures introduced by the government without noting that much of the IMF money was almost immediately stolen and spirited out of Ukraine by an oligarch close to the government. Nor, for that matter, do we learn anything about his son Hunter’s involvement in that nation’s business affairs via his position on the board of Burisma, a natural gas company owned by a former Ukrainian ecology minister accused by the UK government of stealing at least $23 million of Ukrainian taxpayers’ money.
Biden’s recollections of his involvement in Central American affairs are no more forthright, and no more insightful. There is no mention of the 2009 coup in Honduras, endorsed and supported by the United States, that displaced the elected president, Manuel Zelaya, nor of that country’s subsequent descent into the rule of a corrupt oligarchy accused of ties to drug traffickers. He has nothing but warm words for Juan Orlando Hernández, the current president, who financed his 2013 election campaign with $90 million stolen from the Honduran health service and more recently defied his country’s constitution by running for a second term. Instead, we read much about Biden’s shepherding of the Hernández regime, along with its Central American neighbors El Salvador and Guatemala, into the Alliance for Prosperity, an agreement in which the signatories pledged to improve education, health care, women’s rights, justice systems, etc., in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid. In the words of Professor Dana Frank of UC Santa Cruz, the alliance “supports the very economic sectors that are actively destroying the Honduran economy and environment, like mega-dams, mining, tourism, and African palms,” reducing most of the population to poverty and spurring them to seek something better north of the border. The net result has been a tide of refugees fleeing north, most famously exemplified by the “caravan” used by Donald Trump to galvanize support prior to November’s congressional elections.

Biden’s claims of experience on the world stage, therefore, cannot be denied. True, the experience has been routinely disastrous for those on the receiving end, but on the other hand, that is a common fate for those subjected, under any administration, to the operations of our foreign policy apparatus.

Given Biden’s all too evident shortcomings in the fields of domestic and foreign policy, defenders inevitably retreat to the “electability” argument, which contends that he is the only Democrat on the horizon capable of beating Trump—a view that Biden, naturally, endorses. Specifically, this notion rests on the belief that Biden has unequaled appeal among the white working-class voters that many Democrats are eager to court.

To be fair, Biden has earned high ratings from the AFL-CIO thanks to his support for matters such as union organizing rights and a higher minimum wage. On the other hand, he also supported NAFTA in 1994 and permanent normal trade relations with China in 2000, two votes that sounded the death knell for America’s manufacturing economy. Regardless of how justified his pro-labor reputation may be, however, it’s far from clear that the working class holds Biden in any special regard—his two presidential races imploded before any blue-collar workers had a chance to vote for him.

It is this fact that makes the electability argument so puzzling. Biden’s initial bid for the prize in 1988 famously blew up when rivals unkindly publicized his plagiarism of a stump speech given by Neil Kinnock, a British Labour Party politician. (In Britain, Kinnock was known as “the Welsh Windbag,” which may have encouraged the logorrheic Biden to feel a kinship.) Biden partisans pointed out that he had cited Kinnock on previous occasions, though he didn’t always remember to do so. Either way, it was a bizarre snafu. It also emerged that Biden had been incorporating chunks of speeches from both Bobby and Jack Kennedy along with Hubert Humphrey in his remarks without attribution (although reportedly some of this was the work of speechwriter Pat Caddell).

Another gaffe helped upend Biden’s second White House bid, in 2007, when he referred to Barack Obama in patronizing terms as “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” The campaign cratered at the very first hurdle, the Iowa caucuses, where Biden came in fifth, with less than 1 percent of the votes. “It was humiliating,” recalled the ex-staffer. (The “gaffes” seem to take physical form on occasion. “He has a bit of a Me Too problem,” a leading female Democratic activist and fund-raiser told me, referring to his overly tactile approach to interacting with women. “We never had a talk when he wasn’t stroking my back.” He has already faced heckling on the topic, and videos of this behavior during the course of public events and photo ops have been widely circulated.)

Further to the issue of Biden’s assurances that he is the man to beat Trump is the awkward fact that, as the former staffer told me, “he lacks the discipline to build the nuts and bolts of a modern presidential campaign.” Biden “hated having to take orders from [David] Axelrod and the other Obama people as a vice-presidential candidate in 2008. Campaign aides used to say to him, ‘I’ve got three words for you: Air Force Two.’” My informant stressed that Biden “sucks at fund-raising. He never had to try very hard in Delaware. Staff would do it for him.” Certainly, Biden’s current campaign funds would appear to confirm this contention. His PAC, American Possibilities, had raised only two and a half million dollars by the end of 2018, a surprisingly insignificant amount for a veteran senator and two-term vice president. Furthermore, although the PAC’s stated purpose is to “support candidates who believe in American possibilities,” less than a quarter of the money had found its way to Democratic candidates in time for the November midterms, encouraging speculation that Biden is not really that serious about the essential brass tacks of a presidential campaign—which would include building a strong base of support among Democratic officeholders.
Other organizations in the Biden universe behave similarly, expending much of their income on staff salaries and little on their ostensible function. According to an exhaustive New York Times investigation, salaries accounted for 45 percent of spending by the Beau Biden Foundation for the Protection of Children in 2016 and 2017. Similarly, three quarters of the money the Biden Cancer Initiative spent in 2017 went toward salaries and other compensation, including over half a million dollars for its president, Greg Simon, formerly the executive director of Biden’s Cancer Moonshot Task Force during the Obama Administration. Outside the inner circle of senior aides, there does not appear to be an extended Biden network among political professionals standing ready to raise money and perform other tasks necessary to a White House bid, in the way that Hillary Clinton had a network across the political world composed of people who had worked for her and her husband. “Biden doesn’t have that,” his former staffer told me, “because he’s indifferent to staff.” It’s a sentiment that’s been expressed to me by many in the election industry, including a veteran Democratic campaign strategist. “Everyone else is getting everything set up to go once the trigger is pulled,” this individual told me recently. “I myself have firm offers from the [Kamala] Harris and [Cory] Booker campaigns. The Biden people talked to me too, but they could only say, ‘If we run, we’d love to bring you into the fold.’”

At the start of the new year, Biden must have been living in the best of all possible worlds. As he engaged in well-publicized ruminations on whether or not to run, he was enjoying a high profile, with commensurate benefits of sizable book sales and hundred-thousand-dollar speaking engagements. Even more importantly, Biden found himself relevant again. “You’re either on the way up,” he likes to say, “or you’re on the way down,” which is why the temptation to reject the lessons of his two hopelessly bungled White House campaigns has been so overwhelming. Regardless of the current election cycle’s endgame, though, it’s safe to assume that his undimmed ego will never permit any reflection on whether voters who have been eagerly voting for change will ever really settle for Uncle Joe, champion of yesterday’s sordid compromises.
 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
:roflmao: Damn Centerists!


source: Washington Post

Joe Biden on Anita Hill: ‘To this day, I regret I couldn’t come up with a way to get her the kind of hearing she deserved’



UUGO5YSQFAI6TI7XPC3VEWUNL4.jpg

Former vice president Joe Biden speaks at the Biden Courage Awards on Tuesday in New York. (Frank Franklin II/AP)

Former vice president Joe Biden on Tuesday offered another apology for his handling of Anita Hill’s sexual harassment allegations against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in 1991.

“To this day, I regret I couldn’t come up with a way to get her the kind of hearing she deserved, given the courage she showed by reaching out to us,” Biden said in New York at the “Biden Courage Awards,” an event honoring those who have worked to combat sexual assault on college campuses.

Biden, who is mulling a 2020 presidential bid, oversaw the hearing as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Some on Tuesday made note of Biden’s language, pointing out that his use of the word “couldn’t” implied that he had been powerless to change the course of the hearing.



During the 1991 hearing, Hill testified that Thomas had repeatedly made unwanted sexual advances toward her when she worked for him at the U.S. Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Thomas denied the allegations.

Hill, who is black, faced incredulous and accusatory questioning from the panel, which was composed entirely of white men. Biden did little to temper the tone, and Hill and her defenders have blamed him for letting the hearing spiral out of control.

Biden on Tuesday made note of the racial and gender dynamics of the hearing, telling the crowd that Hill was facing “a bunch of white guys hearing this testimony on the Senate Judiciary Committee.”

“So, when Anita Hill came to testify, she faced a committee that didn’t fully understand what the hell it was all about,” he said.

He called Hill “a brave lawyer, a really notable woman” who “showed the courage of a lifetime” by testifying about her allegations against Thomas.

“We knew a lot less about the extent of harassment back then, over 30 years ago,” Biden said. “But she paid a terrible price. She was abused through the hearing. She was taken advantage of. Her reputation was attacked. I wish I could’ve done something.”

Biden has previously said he has regretted his role in the hearing, including at an event hosted by Glamour magazine in November 2017, when he said he was “so sorry that she had to go through what she went through.”

In an interview with The Washington Post a few days later, Hill said “some part of” Biden’s remarks was an apology, “but I still don’t think it takes ownership of his role in what happened.”

Biden also addressed the issue in an interview with Teen Vogue the next month, saying, “I wish I had been able to do more for Anita Hill. I owe her an apology.” He returned to the topic in interviews around the time of September’s confirmation hearing of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, who faced accusations of sexual assault. Kavanaugh has denied the allegations.

During his remarks on Tuesday, Biden noted that he has previously apologized for the Thomas hearing and said it was particularly courageous of Hill to have spoken out given societal views on sexual harassment at the time.

“It took a lot of courage to damage her own career and her own reputation in the face of a cultural bias that if a woman was harassed or abused, she must have done something to deserve it,” he said.

He also referred to the Kavanaugh hearing, noting that the Senate Judiciary Committee “has the power and obligation to set a standard for the nation.”

“It should not be one of the most difficult places for a woman to lay out a story of abuse and harassment,” Biden said. “And yet, last fall, you saw it all over again in the Kavanaugh hearing. In almost 30 years, the culture, the institutional culture has not changed. And that diminishes the likelihood that other women will come forward, knowing what they’re going to face.”
 

MASTERBAKER

༺ S❤️PER❤️ ᗰOD ༻
Super Moderator
Jason Sudeikis returns to ‘SNL’ to skewer Joe Biden


It was cold open season on Joe Biden on “Saturday Night Live,” where former cast member Jason Sudeikis skewered the former veep over his compulsive handsiness.

Sudeikis reprised his role as the high-energy Democrat, meeting with advisers for his potential 2020 presidential campaign to learn how to behave around women.

“You guys know that I’m a tactile politician, right?” Sudeikis’ Biden asks his advisers, played by Cecily Strong and Kenan Thompson.

“I’m a hugger, I’m a kisser and I’m a little bit of a sniffer.”

In the hopes of reining in his behavior, the advisers bring in a sensitivity trainer named Gwen — played by Kate McKinnon. The faux Biden meets her by touching foreheads with her and rubbing his nose against hers.

“I did the 23 and Me thing, like Lizzy Warren, and turns out I am 1 percent Eskimo, so I can do this kissing thing,” Sudeikis says.

Gwen brings in potential voters to try and help Biden learn appropriate behavior — and one of them, played by Aidy Bryant, ends up punching him in the gut after he cradles her face in his hands.

Then, Leslie Jones enters and immediately recognizes Biden as “Obama’s granddaddy” before pulling him in for a hug.

Satisfied that he’s improved Sudeikis’ Biden officially throws his hat in the 2020 ring.

“Come on America, let’s hug it out,” he says. “Biden and some woman, 2020!”
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator

Inside Biden's battle plan


By Marc Caputo
and Natasha Korecki
April 22, 2019



BBWbJZq.img

© Frank Franklin II/AP Photo The long-awaited campaign is finally in the works: Former Vice President Joe Biden’s team
has planned for a video announcement this week.


Joe Biden has led nearly every Democratic primary poll without doing anything. Now, the former vice president’s team is planning to solidify his frontrunner status with a wave of high-profile organizing, fundraising and endorsement news when he enters the race.


Biden’s campaign in waiting has ramped up over the last several weeks — calling donors across the country and tapping decades-old friendships to line up support from major Democratic Party figures, organized labor, members of Congress and elected officials from early presidential states, according to people with direct knowledge of Biden’s campaign strategy. POLITICO also spoke to donors who’ve received calls from Biden’s team, potential campaign aides who have been interviewed for jobs and stakeholders in early primary and caucus states who were asked to pitch in their support.

As Biden seeks on-the-ground labor support in early primary and caucus states, he has all but locked in the endorsement of the International Association of Firefighters, the union that helped boost John Kerry to the Democratic nomination in 2004. This year, union president Harold Schaitberger said, the 315,000-member union plans to quickly deploy an organized effort to boost Biden in the early-voting states.


“I have been in touch on a consistent basis with the campaign and the vice president,” Harold Schaitberger, president of the International Association of Firefighters told POLITICO on Monday. Once Biden's announcement goes live, Schaitberger continued, “our executive board will be prepared to immediately meet and formally take a position on the primary and we’ll likely be prepared to make that announcement on the 29th.”

The early activity is fueled by Biden’s long relationships within the Democratic Party and the bonds he built as Barack Obama’s vice president, which vaulted him to the top of the primary pack this year without rushing into the race early. But Biden’s team sees an opportunity to generate something Biden hasn't yet had this year with a strong entrance: forward momentum, created by proving he has what it takes to compete in a historically large primary field before going toe-to-toe with President Donald Trump.

As Biden's team works to lock down national labor support, it is also chasing union backing in early states like Iowa, where his aides have already interviewed staff.

“I talked to his staff quite a bit,” said Betty Brim-Hunter, who was the state political director to Iowa’s AFL-CIO for 13 years. Asked if she will be with Biden: “100 percent. And I told his staff whatever I can do to help them — I just retired, they have my commitment.”

Former Nevada Democratic chairman Sam Lieberman said Biden has already won his endorsement and he expects "labor could be easily persuaded to support Joe Biden if he was in the mix."

"I have always supported him in the past and I would definitely support him now," Lieberman said. "I’m just concerned that it needs to happen fast because we in Nevada are getting inundated by all the candidates."

The long-awaited campaign is finally in the works: Biden’s team has planned for a video announcement this week. Several sources close to the campaign said previous media reports about timing and location of rallies were not accurate, though the campaign would not comment to clarify. Three people who talked to Biden or his team told POLITICO the announcement could come on Thursday, though the timing remained in flux as of late Monday.

Biden’s formal announcement is to be followed by related launch events, including a fundraiser in Philadelphia. An announcement on early presidential staffing would soon follow, and the campaign would then roll into a series of early-state visits.

“They’re going to launch strategically all over the country,” an operative with knowledge of Biden’s strategy said. “They’ll have people in place in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina and roll out endorsements from elected officials all over the country, so when they come out they can have this show of force.”

In recent weeks, Biden’s team or Biden himself have reached out to donors around the country asking for commitments for a launch this week.

In Philadelphia, a group of donors were asking supporters to write checks even before the fundraiser slated to be held later this week, once Biden is officially in the race.

Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, who is helping organize the fundraiser, said he’s been in contact with Biden’s team and is still awaiting final word on timing for the event, which would follow Biden’s announcement. Rendell said the fundraiser was planned for Thursday as of that moment, but he also said it could be moved to next week.

“We’re doing it on the day they tell us,” Rendell told POLITICO. “They have told us tentatively Thursday but there’s nothing in stone about that.”

Stephen Cozen, an attorney and longtime Biden ally, said the fundraising effort aims “to demonstrate to others that he’s got this very broad band of support at the lowest level, not necessarily even at the highest level, where I’m sure — I know for a fact — there are people with a lot of money sitting out there waiting for Joe to get in. That’s not what we’re concentrating on. We’re concentrating on building the bottom.”

Biden’s call for donors comes as he’s expected to be outpaced on small-donor fundraising by others in the field, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, who so far has the most consistent, highest polling aside from Biden. Small-dollar donations have been a point of emphasis for most candidates, who have sought to portray themselves as outsiders not entangled with special interests.

“It’s not an emergency but it’s a need. He’s got a list. But it’s not a Bernie list,” said a Biden campaign surrogate. “We need to push checks up as early as possible.”

Holly Otterbein and Alex Thompson contributed to this report.


https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/inside-bidens-battle-plan/ar-BBWbYp3?ocid=spartanntp

.
 

muckraker10021

Superstar *****
BGOL Investor
10446630_1304669176229397_3768056064419256578_n.jpg

Joe Biden: Puffery vs. Reality


by Norman Solomon | April 24, 2019 | https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/56199-rsn-joe-biden-puffery-vs-reality

rsn-L.jpg
et’s be blunt: As a supposed friend of American workers, Joe Biden is a phony. And now that he’s running for president, Biden’s huge task is to hide his phoniness.

From the outset, with dim prospects from small donors, the Biden campaign is depending on big checks from the rich and corporate elites who greatly appreciate his services rendered. “He must rely heavily, at least at first, upon an old-fashioned network of money bundlers – political insiders, former ambassadors and business executives,” The New York Times reported on Tuesday.

Biden has a media image that exudes down-to-earth caring and advocacy for regular folks. But his actual record is a very different story.

During the 1970s, in his first Senate term, Biden spouted white backlash rhetoric, used tropes pandering to racism, and teamed up with arch segregationists against measures like busing for school integration. He went on to be a fount of racially charged appeals and “predators on our streets” oratory on the Senate floor as he led the successful effort to pass the now-notorious 1994 crime bill.

A gavel in Biden’s hand repeatedly proved to be dangerous. In 1991, as chair of the Judiciary Committee, Biden prevented key witnesses from testifying to corroborate Anita Hill’s accusations of sexual harassment during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court. In 2002, as chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, Biden was the Senate’s most crucial supporter of the Iraq invasion.

Meanwhile, for well over four decades – while corporate media preened his image as “Lunch Bucket Joe” fighting for the middle class – Biden continued his assist for strengthening oligarchy as a powerful champion of legalizing corporate plunder on a mind-boggling scale.

Now, Joe Biden has arrived as a presidential candidate to rescue the Democratic Party from Bernie Sanders.

Urgency is in the media air. Last week, The New York Times told readers that “Stop Sanders” Democrats were “agonizing over his momentum.” The story was front-page news. At The Washington Post, a two-sentence headline appeared just above a nice photo of Biden: “Far-Left Policies Will Drive a 2020 Defeat, Centrist Democrats Fear. So They’re Floating Alternatives.”

Biden is the most reliable alternative for corporate America. He has what Sanders completely lacks – vast experience as an elected official serving the interests of credit-card companies, big banks, insurance firms, and other parts of the financial services industry. His alignment with corporate interests has been comprehensive. It was a fulcrum of his entire political career when, in 1993, Senator Biden voted yes while most Democrats in Congress voted against NAFTA.

In recent months, from his pro-corporate vantage point, Biden has been taking potshots at the progressive populism of Bernie Sanders. At a gathering in Alabama last fall, Biden said: “Guys, the wealthy are as patriotic as the poor. I know Bernie doesn’t like me saying that, but they are.” Later, Biden elaborated on the theme when he told an audience at the Brookings Institution, “I don’t think five hundred billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble. The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.”

Overall, in sharp contrast to the longstanding and continuing negative coverage of Sanders, mainstream media treatment of Biden often borders on reverential. The affection from so many high-profile political journalists toward Biden emerged yet again a few weeks ago during the uproar about his persistent pattern of intrusively touching women and girls. During one cable news show after another, reporters and pundits were at pains to emphasize his essential decency and fine qualities.

But lately, some independent-minded journalists have been exhuming what “Lunch Bucket Joe” is eager to keep buried. For instance:

Libby Watson, Splinter News: “Joe Biden is telling striking workers he’s their friend while taking money from, and therefore being beholden to, the class of people oppressing them. According to Axios, Biden’s first fundraiser will be with David Cohen, the executive vice president of and principal lobbyist for Comcast. Comcast is one of America’s most hated companies, and for good reason. It represents everything that sucks for the modern consumer-citizen, for whom things like internet or TV access are extremely basic necessities, but who are usually given the option of purchasing it from just one or two companies.” What’s more, Comcast supports such policies as “ending net neutrality and repealing broadband privacy protections.... And Joe Biden is going to kick off his presidential campaign by begging for their money.”

Ryan Cooper, The Week: “As a loyal toady of the large corporations (especially finance, insurance, and credit cards) that put their headquarters in Delaware because its suborned government allows them to evade regulations in other states, Biden voted for repeated rounds of deregulation in multiple areas and helped roll back anti-trust policy – often siding with Republicans in the process. He was a key architect of the infamous 2005 bankruptcy reform bill which made means tests much more strict and near-impossible to discharge student loans in bankruptcy.”

Paul Waldman, The American Prospect: “Joe Biden, we are told over and over, is the one who can speak to the disaffected white men angry at the loss of their primacy. He's the one who doesn’t like abortion, but is willing to let the ladies have them. He’s the one who tells white people to be nice to immigrants, even as he mirrors their xenophobia (‘You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent,’ he said in 2006). He’s the one who validates their racism and sexism while gently trying to assure them that they're still welcome in the Democratic Party.... It’s not yet clear what policy agenda Biden will propose, though it’s likely to be pretty standard Democratic fare that rejects some of the more ambitious goals other candidates have embraced. But Biden represents something more fundamental: a link to the politics and political style of the past.”

Rebecca Traister, The Cut: “Much of what Democrats blame Republicans for was enabled, quite literally, by Biden: Justices whose confirmation to the Supreme Court he rubber-stamped worked to disembowel affirmative action, collective bargaining rights, reproductive rights, voting rights.... In his years in power, Biden and his party (elected thanks to a nonwhite base enfranchised in the 1960s) built the carceral state that disproportionately imprisons and disenfranchises people of color, as part of what Michelle Alexander has described as the New Jim Crow. With his failure to treat seriously claims of sexual harassment made against powerful men on their way to accruing more power (claims rooted in prohibitions that emerged from the feminist and civil-rights movements of the 1970s), Biden created a precedent that surely made it easier for accused harassers, including Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh, to nonetheless ascend. Economic chasms and racial wealth gaps have yawned open, in part thanks to Joe Biden’s defenses of credit card companies, his support of that odious welfare-reform bill, his eagerness to support the repeal of Glass-Steagall.”
One of Biden’s illuminating actions came last year in Michigan when he gave a speech – for a fee of $200,000 including “travel allowance” – that praised the local Republican congressman, Fred Upton, just three weeks before the mid-term election. From the podium, the former vice president lauded Upton as “one of the finest guys I’ve ever worked with.” For good measure, Biden refused to endorse Upton’s Democratic opponent, who went on to lose by less than 5 percent.

Biden likes to present himself as a protector of the elderly. Campaigning for Senator Bill Nelson in Florida last autumn, Biden denounced Republicans for aiming to “cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.” Yet five months earlier, speaking to the Brookings Institution on May 8, Biden spoke favorably of means testing that would go a long way toward damaging political support for Social Security and Medicare and smoothing the way for such cuts.

Indications of being a “moderate” and a “centrist” play well with the Washington press corps and corporate media, but amount to a surefire way to undermine enthusiasm and voter turnout from the base of the Democratic Party. The consequences have been catastrophic, and the danger of the party’s deference to corporate power looms ahead. Much touted by the same kind of insular punditry that insisted Hillary Clinton was an ideal candidate to defeat Donald Trump, the ostensible “electability” of Joe Biden has been refuted by careful analysis of data.

As a former Sanders delegate to the 2016 Democratic National Convention and a current coordinator of the relaunched independent Bernie Delegates Network for 2019, I remain convinced that the media meme about choosing between strong progressive commitments and capacity to defeat Trump is a false choice. On the contrary, Biden exemplifies a disastrous approach of jettisoning progressive principles and failing to provide a progressive populist alternative to right-wing populism. That’s the history of 2016. It should not be repeated.

Your-Average-Joe.jpg

20170812_USD000_0.jpg
 
Last edited:

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
source: CNN

Joe Biden declines to apologize in first television interview of his 2020 campaign



(CNN) The hosts of ABC's "The View" were looking -- and asking, repeatedly -- for an apology from Joe Biden.

But the former vice president deflected them at almost every turn, offering qualified regrets over his handling of Anita Hill's 1991 testimony and more recent allegations from women who said Biden made them feel awkward or uncomfortable.

In his first interview since launching a third presidential campaign a day ago, Biden began by talking with the popular daytime show's all-woman panel about his relationship with former president Barack Obama -- "very close" -- and President Donald Trump's early insults, which he laughed off. The conversation, though, quickly shifted to old and newer controversies surrounding Biden himself.

Asked about the women who have come forward recently to say they felt he had invaded their personal space, Biden nodded to their concerns, saying, "I have to be, and everybody has to be, much more aware of the private space of men and women. It's not just women, but primarily women. And I am much more cognizant of that."

When co-host Sunny Hostin noted that the women have asked for him to say sorry, Biden seemed intent to side-step an outright apology.

"I'm really sorry if in talking to them, in trying to console, that in fact they took it a different way," Biden said. "And it's my responsibility to make sure that I bend over backwards to try and understand how not to do that."

Given a third opportunity, Biden again demurred. "I'm sorry this happened," he said, "but I'm not sorry in the sense that I think I did something that was intentionally designed to do anything wrong or be inappropriate. It was inappropriate that I didn't understand."

Biden and the hosts had a similar exchange over his handling of the 1991 confirmation hearings of then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. Biden was the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee when Anita Hill came forward to accuse Thomas of sexual harassment. During her subsequent testimony, she was subject to intense and probing questions from an all-male, all-white panel of senators.

The grim spectacle, over which Biden presided, has echoed for decades and is widely regarded as a turning point -- at Hill's personal expense -- in the conversation around sexual harassment in the work place.

Biden recently called Hill to discuss them, his campaign revealed on Thursday. Hill told the New York Times that she would not describe Biden's comments to her as an apology.

Given another chance on Friday, Biden said he was "grateful" that Hill took his call and regretted how her testimony unfolded, saying "there were a lot of mistakes made across the board. For that, I apologize."

"I'm not going to judge whether or not (the call) was appropriate, that she thought it was sufficient," Biden told the panel, "but I said (to Hill) privately what I've said publicly: I'm sorry she was treated the way she was treated. I wish we could have figured out a better way to get this thing done. I did everything in my power to do what I thought was within the rules to be able to stop things."

Asked why he waited so many years to reach out to Hill directly, Biden said that after he had "publicly apologized for the way she was treated" and "publicly gave her credit for the contributions (she) made to change this culture," he worried how a call would be received.

"I didn't want to, quote, 'invade her space,'" Biden said. But after reading about Hill's desire to hear an apology and consulting with "leading women advocates in this area," Biden chose to reach out.

At that, Ana Navarro, a political commentator on the panel, suggested that Hill wanted a more fulsome and direct apology from Biden -- "I think she wants you to say I'm sorry for the way I treated you, not the way you were treated," Navarro said.

"I'm sorry the way she got treated," Biden replied, distancing himself from the more antagonistic Republican senators on the committee and wider Republican effort at the time to discredit Hill. "I never heard -- if you go back and look at what I said and I didn't say, I don't think I treated her badly. I took on her opposition. What I couldn't figure out how to do -- and we still haven't figured it out -- how do you stop people from asking inflammatory questions? How do you stop the character assassinations?"

Biden was greeted warmly by the show's panel. As he took the stage, he was introduced as "the legendary Joe Biden" and then spoke glowingly and length about his relationship with Obama, describing them as "very close personal friends." But Biden said he did not ask for his old boss's endorsement because, as he put it, "I didn't want it to look like he was putting his thumb on the scale."

The 76-year-old also ruled out any kind of pledge to serve a single term, calling his age a "legitimate question," then adding he hoped to "demonstrate that with age comes wisdom and experience."

Biden also made light of Trump's recent attacks and name-calling. The President frequently refers to Biden as "Sleepy Joe" and, on Thursday morning, described himself, at age 72, as "a young, vibrant man."

"If he looks young and vibrant compared to me, I should probably go home," Biden said. "Look, everybody knows who Donald Trump is. The best way to judge me is to watch. See if I have the energy and the capacity."

Presidential politics, he added, are "a show-me business."
 

muckraker10021

Superstar *****
BGOL Investor

For the Democratic party uppermost shot callers (F.D.R.) Franklin Delano Roosevelt ‘liberalism’ has been long been replaced by neo-liberalism, authoritarianism and fealty to moneyed elites— corporatism. The “Democratic Party” of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson is long dead. The hollow shell that remains that insist on maintaining the moniker “Democratic Party” is currently led overwhelmingly by politicos who bow at the altar of authoritarianism — corporate power.

Current “Democratic” leaders give speeches that contain echoes of prior “Democratic Party” leaders principled defense of liberal values — but today's speeches are just vacuous homilies dispensed to the party’s base voters like catnip as the candidate speeds to another closed door fund raiser with millionaires and billionaires. Joe Biden is most comfortable in these corporatism country clubs who gave us Democratic leaders and consiglieres like the “Billary Clintons”, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Jon Corzine, Michael Bloomberg, et al.

These people and other “democrats?” that if you follow politics you can easily name, are horrified at the prospect of a Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and other prospective candidates that share their true progressive values about how to rescue AmeriKKKa from neo-fascism of Trump.
These corporate democrats don’t want any radical change in the status quo. They want to keep their preferential 15% wall st. taxation rate on their paper trading profits. They were all opposed to the $15 a hour minimum wage, until they were dragged kicking and screaming there by base democratic voters. None of the corporatist democrats spoke out against the ending of net-neutrality rules that Trump passed. None of them are for the restoration of free college tuition at State Universities for qualified students which was normal from the end of WW2 till the 1970’s. Look up the list of famous notable Americans from politics and all fields who graduated from the State of California University system and the State of New York University system including New York City university system; people like Colin Powell, Henry Kissinger and thousands more who graduated college with NO debt.


The corporate centrist Democrats including reprehensible Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel have derided the majority of the “Democratic Party” base voters, the most loyal supporters who call themselves liberals and progressives — Rahm calls them all “fucking retarded” — http://tinyurl.com/zwh5vmx
Hillary was the embodiment of these “corporate democrats” and is a close friend of Emanuel and embodies his values and disdain for non-low information “Democratic” base voters who overwhelmingly support non-corporate candidates like Senator Sanders or Senator Warren. Thanks to the SCOTUS Citizens United decision our politics are ruled by unlimited amounts of money; whose origins are legally allowed to be secret “Dark Money”. If this reality is not abruptly halted it will destroy what is left of liberalism in America and turn the U.S.A. into a total corporate controlled plutocracy. These are the people Joe Biden is riding or dying with.





logo-sm.png


Joe Biden Doesn't Deserve Your Nostalgia
merlin_154388052_e148992d-91e9-4987-8029-9722ceba9855-jumbo.jpg

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/joe-biden-doesnt-deserve-your-nostalgia/

If there is one thing we can take away from the first two weeks of Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, it’s that the former vice president is feeling nostalgic. Uncle Joe is longing for the good old days, before President Trump happened and before the Republican Party went completely off the rails. The days when Democrats and Republicans could be friends, when compromise wasn’t a dirty word, and when civility prevailed. The days when the center held strong, and pragmatic statesmen like him and his friend Dick Cheney could cut deals behind closed doors. The days, in other words, when things were normal.

As some have already pointed out, Biden is essentially running a backward-looking campaign of restoration based on Democratic nostalgia for the Obama years, which in itself will get him a long way in the polls (at least in the Democratic primaries). But it is also clear that Biden’s nostalgia goes much further back than the heyday of the Obama administration.

The former VP embodies a kind of baby boomer nostalgia for the era during which what is now called neoliberalism prevailed. That period started around the time Biden was elected to the Senate as a young man in 1972 (technically, Biden is a few years too old to qualify as a boomer, but he fits right in with that generation). That he harbors a certain romantic longing for the days of old, when the best and the brightest acted like adults and bipartisan centrism was the only game in town, is all one really needs to know about Biden in order to get an idea of how he will govern if elected president. Those who thought Barack Obama was too much of a centrist will miss him once Biden becomes president.

According to Biden’s own rhetoric, once he is elected, all will basically return to normal and, after a period of healing, the country will continue on its previous course. “Limit [Trump’s presidency] to four years,” he recently said in Iowa, and “history will treat this administration’s time as an aberration.” For good measure, Biden went on to defend Republicans from their own president (which they seem unwilling to do themselves): “This is not the Republican Party,” he remarked, before pointing to his “Republican friends” in Congress.

It is hard to imagine that the man who served as Obama’s second in command for eight years can’t seem to grasp that the current GOP is now, in fact, the party of Trump (and has been for a long time). Yet we have to remember that Biden served close to four decades in the Senate before he became Obama’s VP. Biden’s time in Congress obviously shaped who he is today far more than his time in the White House, and, contrary to what his apologists now say, that aspect of his background does matter. As a senator, Biden frequently sided with his Republican colleagues on major issues—from his championing of NAFTA, welfare reform and financial deregulation to his support for the Iraq War (and the war on drugs). Admittedly, Republicans and Democrats agreed on far more than they disagreed on during the ’90s, but this is exactly the problem that progressives are trying to correct today.

When we consider Biden’s neoliberal legacy in full, his current restoration campaign makes perfect sense. His nostalgia is ultimately based on the idea that, all things considered, we were headed in the right direction before Trump came along. He seems to believe that his generation (with the leadership of great individuals like him, of course) achieved unparalleled progress over the past 40 years, right up until the Orange Menace appeared out of nowhere and threatened to reverse it all.

This attitude was evident in a 2018 video clip that recently went viral, in which Biden criticizes millennials for complaining too much, while discussing the brave activism of his own generation. “The younger generation now tells me how tough things are—give me a break. No, no, I have no empathy for it, give me a break.” The clip didn’t fully show what Biden said next, which is, in some ways, even more revealing: “Because here’s the deal, guys. We [the boomer generation] decided we were going to change the world, and we did. We did. We finished the civil rights movement to the first stage. The women’s movement came to be.”

This isn’t just a classic case of an older, out-of-touch person disparaging youths and condescendingly telling them to toughen up without hearing a word they say. Biden goes further than that, essentially telling millennials to be grateful to members of his generation for all they did to make the world a better place. While there has obviously been progress in many areas over the past few decades, one has to be remarkably obtuse not to see how the past 40 years of neoliberalism have hurt the younger generations and left the very future of the planet in jeopardy (as David Wallace-Wells documents in his brilliant but depressing new book, “The Uninhabitable Earth”), and no generation bears more responsibility for this state of affairs than Biden’s does.

The real irony of Biden’s boomer nostalgia is that Donald Trump, that great enemy of progress, is the ultimate product of the self-absorbed boomer mentality that flourished in the late 20th century, concurrent with the rise of neoliberalism. Trump encapsulates all of the worst qualities of the Me Generation: his narcissism, his greed and crass materialism, his selfish disregard for posterity, his shallow hedonism. Contrary to what Biden says, Trump—the man and the political phenomenon—is not an aberration, but the natural outcome of political, economic and cultural trends of the past half-century.

Of course, focusing too much on Trump as an individual distracts us from the reality that his election was part of a much larger trend that has engulfed the entire planet over the past decade. It is no coincidence that the explosion of populism took place in the decade following the Great Recession, when the gaps between the rich and poor have grown even wider and the dire effects of climate change have become clearer. Populism is a direct response to the growing contradictions of capitalism and the failures of the status quo, and only those who have greatly benefited from this status quo can possibly think that Trump came out of nowhere (then again, Biden has never been much interested in causes, only in symptoms).

According to the latest polls, Biden has a strong lead in the Democratic primaries, and there’s no doubt that partisan nostalgia for the Obama years is the main reason for this. To take on Biden, the other candidates will have to make the case for why returning to the way things were is neither a viable nor desirable option. Currently in second place is Bernie Sanders, who has directly challenged the notion that Trump is some kind of anomaly. In a recent campaign email, Sanders’ campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, wrote that it is a mistake “to think that this election is simply about beating one man—an aberration of a president—and that everything will simply return to ‘normal.’ ”

“The reality,” Shakir continues, “is that ‘normal’ in our country before there was a President Trump still meant an immoral lack of health care, unlivable low wages, rampant corporate greed, a racist criminal justice system, and a corrupt political system.”

The rise of populism in America and elsewhere over the past decade represents a clear rejection of neoliberalism, but among many liberals and Democratic voters, there is a strong desire for normality. Political nostalgia, however, is ultimately a conservative and even a reactionary yearning, and while it may be true that the previous state of affairs was preferable to the current state, the latter would never have been possible if it weren’t for the failures of the former.

20170812_USD000_0.jpg
 
Last edited:

MASTERBAKER

༺ S❤️PER❤️ ᗰOD ༻
Super Moderator
Is A Joe Biden Kamala Harris Ticket In The Works?


Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris may be the perfect match to take on President Donald Trump in 2020, according to the Congressional Black Caucus 2020 Democrats primary field. Details: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/0...
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Ex-Bernie aide Symone Sanders joins Biden campaign


Symone Sanders, who gained prominence after working for Bernie Sanders's 2016 presidential campaign, is expected to join former Vice President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign as a senior adviser.

Sanders, 29, has served as a political analyst on CNN since working as a spokeswoman for the Vermont senator's 2016 campaign. The strategist has been wooed by multiple 2020 candidates and met with Biden a few weeks ago before being offered the position, The Associated Press reports.

The strategist shared the report of her hire on Twitter, calling Biden and his wife Dr. Jill Biden "a class act," adding, "Over the course of this campaign, Vice President Biden is going to make his case to the American [people]."



 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Ex-Bernie aide Symone Sanders joins Biden campaign


source: The Grio

CNN’s Symone Sanders catches heat for belittling “unsolicited opinions” from Black men

CNN contributor Symone Sanders is facing some pretty stiff backlash from social media after her dismissive tweet of Black men’s opinions spurred by an op-ed about Kamala Harris.

The issues began when Sanders dismissively responded to an op-ed in the Miami New Times by former 2 Live Crew frontman Luther Campbell that says that Harris’ history as a district attorney in San Francisco would be a legitimate issue for black voters, particularly black men. Campbell has run a youth football league in his native Miami which he uses as a way to keep young black men off the streets and out of jail.

“Kamala Harris will have trouble persuading black voters to make her president in 2020,” Campbell wrote in the column. “First, the U.S. senator from California must explain why Donald Trump has a better prison-reform record than she had as the Golden State’s attorney general.”

“Though black voters want politicians who’ll put away thugs and killers terrorizing the neighborhood, they don’t support those who deny defendants rehabilitation and send them to prison for crimes they didn’t commit to line private prison companies’ pockets,” he added. Sanders, 29, apparently didn’t care much for what the former Uncle Luke said and dismissively tweeted the column out with a response for Campbell.

“Uncle Luke is no political mastermind or strategist,” Sanders tweeted. “Why do black men keep popping up with their unsolicited opinions about Kamala Harris?”

Sanders is a former press secretary to Independent Vermont Se. Bernie Sanders, who himself incurred the wrath of Black voters in 2016. Her response to Campbell and “black men,” which sounded similar to Tomi Lahren’s dismissive insults toward Cardi B., quickly earned her backlash from Black men and women

“Unsolicited? Obviously, it was solicited — it’s in the paper,” comedian and podcast host Tim Black replied. “Men can speak Symone. I know you’d rather we didn’t unless it supports your opinions. Speech is available to us all, not just MSNBC contributors like you who weaponize gender.”




Another tweeted: “Not once Ms Sanders did you refute @unclelukereal1’s article. We (Black men) see right through what is trying to be done. Kamala and those like her (you included I guess) are aligned with everyone but…BLACK MEN. It’s not gonna work.”

A number of Black women also went at Sanders.



Tangela Sears, an activist who leads the group Florida Parents of Murdered Children, tore into Sanders and said that she would confront Harris about her record whenever she visits Florida. Campbell responded by saying Sanders needs to start “cleaning this up” and chided her for attacking him personally.

“You shouldn’t have taken it personal,” he said. “I just attacked her policies not her personally. You attack me personally. Not good”



Sanders responded by saying that her “unsolicited opinions” shot at Campbell came from his suggestion that Harris came to power through “having an affair” with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, not her record.

“The misogyny and talking about her husband is unnecessary and beneath us all,” she tweeted. “I have seen these sentiments shared from Black men on Sen. Harris far too often. This has nothing to do with her record. It’s about something else that’s toxic.

“That has no place here and I’m not standing for it. Because today it’s Kamala tomorrow it’s another black woman. So I’m not silencing the voices of Black men – especially when it comes to political conversation – we need you,” she added. “Your voices are vital here, a critical convo about her record is key, but I implore you to engage in a high level conversation instead of stooping to the distasteful and frankly disappointing level of Uncle Luke.”
 

muckraker10021

Superstar *****
BGOL Investor


Neoliberalism Is Dead — But the Neoliberal
Elite Still Haven’t Gotten the Memo

Screen-Shot-2018-08-30-at-3.03.59-PM.png

June 4, 2019 | https://www.rawstory.com/2019/06/neoliberalism-is-dead-but-the-neoliberal-elite-still-havent-gotten-the-memo/

The evidence keeps piling up. Neoliberalism is dead.


Just look at the record. Trump—a cross between a carney barker and a conman—beat a neoliberal in 2016. Right-wing populists have scored big in Austria, Italy, Britain, and Brazil since then. Just recently, Australia’s right-of-center Labor coalition won their election. And in the European Union’s latest contest, Greens won big while right-wing parties made gains in some areas. All these victories came at the expense of neoliberal centrists.


Bottom line: Across the world, people are finally wising up to the fact that neoliberalism has failed them economically, politically, and environmentally. In fact, the climate crisis—an existential threat to human civilization—is a direct result of the global neoliberal juggernaut that has swept the developed world. So are the record levels of income and wealth disparity, and the subversion of democracy by a powerful oligarchy—particularly in the US.


The only folks who didn’t get the memo on this appears to be the neoliberal mafia that runs the Democratic Party and the mainstream media here in the US.


At a time when neoliberalism is all but dead, Democrats and the mainstream media are pushing Joe Biden, a neoliberal with a track record of supporting corporations and financial interests above the people’s interests; a man who’s backed by PACs; a man whose small-bore response to the climate crisis amounts to mass genocide for people and the species we share the planet with.


According to The Hill’s media reporter, Joe Concha, Biden is getting more media coverage than all the other Democratic candidates combined, and the month after he announced, in one week alone, Biden was mentioned 1400 times, to 400 for Sanders, who is running second in the polls. This kind of backing by the party and the press is reminiscent of how they treated Hillary Clinton in 2016, and the results will probably be the same. It’s hard for a true progressive candidate to compete when the majority of the liberal infrastructure—academia, think tanks, not-for-profits, the press, Wall Street, banks and wealthy backers—line up behind a candidate.


But with people awakening to the consequences of neoliberalism, Biden is the wrong man at the wrong time.


Ryan Cooper summed up his record succinctly, here:


His economic policy career has been one disgrace after the next — sponsoring or voting for multiple rounds of financial deregulation, trade deals that savaged the American manufacturing base, and bankruptcy “reform” that made it much harder to discharge consumer debt (and nearly impossible to get rid of student debt).


Remember Clinton’s rational about “evolving” on issues as she attempted to veer leftward in 2016? Well, Biden will have to do more than evolve—he’ll have to shed his entire skin like a snake in August. Trump will have a field day running against him.


Meanwhile, Pelosi, Schumer, Hoyer and crew are spewing centrist Pablum about capitalism and the power of free markets; they’re embracing austerity (remember Paygo, their very first initiative?); they’re preaching the gospel of small government and small bore policies; they’re eschewing the idea of a bold platform based on sweeping programs designed to meet the immense challenges facing us; they’re refusing to do what must be done to salvage a future worth living for our children and those yet to be borne.


Their entire strategy seems to center on showing everyone how bad Trump is, and the central debate within the party is whether to impeach or not.


People are tired of bickering, however justified. Impeach or not, Democrats will have to develop a values-based platform that addresses the ills of their neoliberal past if they want to win. If they don’t do this—and so far, the leadership is fighting hard to avoid doing it—voter turnout will be less than 60 percent, a number that would guarantee a Democratic victory. The more they embrace their neoliberal past, the lower the turnout will be; embracing a candidate like Biden or some other centrist will also drive turnout lower.


And yet here they are—holding fast to the philosophy, policies and candidates that turned them into a minority party, even as the world sends them lesson after lesson.


And this is how Trump will win. The 2020 election will be all about turnout, just as the 2016 election was. And as I said in the years leading up to 2016, Hillary Clinton would depress turnout and that would enable a Republican victory—even if they ran a buffoon.


Now the Democrats are gearing up for an instant replay, complete with the inevitable surprised forehead slaps and embarrassed pundits asking, on November 4, 2020 “How could this have happened, again?”

How, indeed.

20170812_USD000_0.jpg


 

muckraker10021

Superstar *****
BGOL Investor
Ex-Bernie aide Symone Sanders joins Biden campaign

http://www.businessinsider.com/joe-biden-lgbtq-rights-top-legislative-priority-2019-6

Joe Biden promises that gay rights will be his #1 priority if elected
:smh:


Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden declared Saturday that the Equality Act would be his top legislative priority.
He was speaking as part of a keynote address to hundreds of activists at the Human Rights Campaign's annual Ohio gala.
"It's wrong and it is immoral what they're doing," Biden said of the Trump administration, citing its attempts to bar transgender troops from the US military and allow homeless shelters to refuse transgender occupants.

Your-Average-Joe.jpg

Biden is getting idiot advice if he thinks LGBTQ rights is the No. 1 legislative priority that the United States needs to focus on in 2020. Maybe he got that deluded idea from the man below; it is NOT a winning strategy, even gay man presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg would never say something so Stupid!!




The RepubliKlan Party of 2019 is:

• Unapologetically proudly RACIST 'MAGA'
• Virulently HOMOPHOBIC - kick them out of government positions including military
• Anti-Sex Education in schools- let the kids breed
• Anti-Birth Control - if you get pregnant, NO abortion for you
• Anti- Immigrants unless you look Norwegian(Build a wall, stop ALL Mexicans & Muslims & 'shithole' Africans)
• Anti- ANY Minimum Wage increase, in fact cut the wage as last RepubliKlan gov. of MO. did
• Anti- Student Loans (big cuts in Pell grants; blocked interest rate cut on loans)
• Anti-Abortion Rights - make it illegal even if you raped by Dad(republiklans were silent when Dr. George Tiller was murdered)
• Anti-Consumer Protection (pro-tort reform)
• Anti- Climate Change Science Reality (It's not real it's a communist plot)
• Anti- Environmental Clean-Up (Piyush Jindal of LA blocked law mandating oil corp. clean up of gulf coast)
• Anti- Infrastructure $$$$ Replacement (U.S. bridges & roads are old & crumbling)
• Anti-Regulating The Banksters (want to repeal Dodd-Frank & all restraints on criminality)
• Anti-Social Security Insurance (want to end it & send the existing money to Wall street)
• Anti-Medicare (want to send Grandma into the clutches of the "Health Care Mafia" with a coupon)
• Anti-Unemployment Insurance (want to end it; cut it to a max of 8 weeks))
• Anti- Healthy School Lunch for kids (have attacked & want to REPEAL Mrs. Obama's healthy lunch reforms)
• Anti-Education Standards (republiklans want to close the Dept. of Education & teach biblical creationism)
• Anti-W.I.C. (republiklan congress recently cut money for Women Infants & Children program)
• Anti- Environmental Conservation Laws (want to close the EPA & burn MORE coal; fuck Americans health)
• Anti-Food Saftey Inspections (republiklan congress recently cut US food saftey budget)
• Anti- Ingredient Labels on Food (republiklans don't want you to know whats in the food)
• Anti-Progressive Taxation (republiklans against raising the 15% tax Millionaires & Billionaires pay)
• Anti-Banning the Death Penalty (278 INNOCENT people released from Death Row since 1989)
• Anti- Restoring Habeas corpus (republiklans NOT against "disappearing" people)
• Anti-Separation Of Church & State (republiklans want to mandate Christian prayer ONLY in schools)
• Anti- Government Funding of Scientific Research (republiklans have slashed funding i.e. stem cell research)
• Anti-Feminism (woman should be submissive to men; it's in the bible)
• Anti-Affirmative Action (republiklans say "there is NO racism in AmeriKKKa)
• Anti-Department of Labor (republiklans believe overtime pay should be abolished)
• Anti-Small Business Administration (want to abolish it)
• Anti-Substantially Increasing Foreign Aid (republiklan congress just cut food aid to AFRICA)
• Anti-Government Student College Tuition Grants (republiklans want to dramatically cut PELL grants & other Education programs)
• Anti-ANY Gun Control; 100 round clips should be standard
• Anti- NON-Christian Religion Tolerance - Islam & Judaism should be aberrations
• Anti- Universal Health Care - preexisting condition, fuck you, perform your own surgery.
• Anti- Ban Against Torture (republiklans support "rectal" feeding & slicing of detainees genitals)
• Anti- ANY Cut In Military Spending
• Anti- Pay Increase For US Soldiers (republiklans consistently vote NO)
• Anti- Increase in Veterans Benefits (republiklans want to convert military pensions into 401K's)
• Anti- Equalizing Penalty for Crack/ Powder Cocaine Conviction
• Anti- Ending Draconian mandatory loooong sentences for drug possession
• Anti- Womens Health/ Well-Women Care (republiklans vote to 100% defund Planned Parenthood)
• Anti- Legislation Banning Outsourcing (republiklans voted AGAINST law prohibiting outsourcing by companies $$$$$ bailed out by U.S. taxpayers)
 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
source: Vox


The problem with Joe Biden’s Republican “epiphany” theory of bipartisanship

No Republican “epiphany” will be forthcoming.



All successful politicians traffic in feel-good fantasy. After all, who doesn’t want to hear that hard problems have easy solutions and that whatever feels troubling today is but a passing storm cloud.

Perhaps it is in this spirit, then, that we should interpret candidate Joe Biden’s campaign trail remark that once President Joe Biden kicks Donald Trump out of the White House, Republicans will have an “epiphany” and start working with Democrats toward consensus.

“I just think there is a way, and the thing that will fundamentally change things is with Donald Trump out of the White House. Not a joke. You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends,” Biden said. (Though the “not a joke” qualification does raise the obvious question of whether it is, in fact, a joke.)

Certainly, such an epiphany would be a welcome development if it were to occur. And perhaps many voters believe it should be this easy, which is why Biden is peddling this line. Perhaps Biden even believes it himself. But, spoiler alert: It’s not that easy.

Why there will be no “epiphany”

In June 2012, Barack Obama made a similar prediction about Republicans embracing bipartisanship after Obama was re-elected:

”I believe that If we’re successful in this election, when we’re successful in this election, that the fever may break, because there’s a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that. My hope, my expectation, is that after the election, now that it turns out that the goal of beating Obama doesn’t make much sense because I’m not running again, that we can start getting some cooperation again.”

Obviously, Obama’s prediction did not come true. Republicans did not suddenly embrace bipartisanship on November 7, 2012.

Biden’s prediction and Obama’s prediction have the some underlying logic: that Republicans’ hostility to Democrats is personality-based. In Obama’s explanation, it was a fundamental hostility to him personally. In Biden’s case, Republicans are deeply under the spell of Donald Trump, who is uniquely hostile to civility and consensus.

The problem with Obama’s theory was that, once Obama was out of office, Republicans’ hostility transferred seamlessly to another Democrat, Hillary Clinton. The problem with Biden’s theory is that Republicans’ hostility to Democrats did not begin with Donald Trump (see, the Obama administration).

Today, as in 2012, the partisan hostility is highly transferable. It is based neither in opposition to one president nor loyalty to another. It is based in the underlying zero-sum electoral logic that defines the American two-party system and the winner-take-all elections that make the two-party system possible.

As political scientist Frances Lee has eloquently written in her book, Insecure Majorities:

“The primary way that parties make an electoral case for themselves vis-a-vis their opposition is by magnifying their differences. In a two-party system, one party’s loss is another party’s gain. A party looks for ways to make its opposition appear weak and incompetent, and to seem extreme and out of touch with mainstream public opinion. As parties angle for competitive advantage using such tactics, the upshot is a more confrontational style of partisanship in Congress.”

Lee has argued that today’s close partisan balance, with control of national governing institutions potentially up for grabs with every election, has made bipartisan compromise very difficult. The more the “out” party obstructs and attacks the “in” party, the less legitimate the “in” party will seem in the next election.

In short, if Joe Biden assumes office in 2021, what incentive will congressional Republicans have to work with him? Helping a President Biden achieve his policy goals would help Democrats become more popular. Republicans’ future electoral success would depend on Democrats becoming less popular. It’s the same as when Obama began his second term in 2013. This is why the “fever” didn’t break.

It’s also why congressional Democrats immediately went into resistance mode following the 2016 election. Why would Democrats ever work with Republicans to help Donald Trump achieve anything? It’s the same logic, but with a very different emotional feel.

Of course, if you are a Democrat, you might now be thinking something like this: “Of course Democrats had to oppose Trump. He is anathema to everything Democrats stand for.”

And this takes us to the second reason why Republicans are not going to suddenly work with Democrats. Republicans and Democrats represent very different constituencies, with different values. The two parties today have very little overlap. And because their coalitions are so different, they deeply distrust and fear each other.

The parties are really different today
In his campaign remarks, Biden recalled how, over his career, he worked with “a lot of good people” in both parties. “We can get back to that place,” Biden said optimistically. Again, it’s a nice sentiment. But unless Joe Biden has a secret time machine, it ain’t gonna happen.

Joe Biden was first elected in the United States in 1972, when partisan polarization was at a low. In the 1970s, it was fashionable to argue that political parties were on the verge of extinction; there was so much cross-partisan deal-making that partisan labels had become basically meaningless. Congress operated very differently as a result.

Over the course of Biden’s career, partisan polarization has grown steadily. The liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats who once crossed party lines have gone extinct. When Biden was first elected in 1972, Mississippi had two Democratic Senators (John C. Stennis and James Eastland), and Vermont had two Republican Senators (George Aiken and Robert Stafford). Split-ticket voting was at an all-time high.

In short, there were bipartisan deals to be made because genuine cross-party overlap existed on many issues, and many lawmakers were responding to genuine cross-party constituencies.

Those incentives simply don’t exist today. The two parties today are actually two separate parties, with little overlap, in large part due to the nationalization of politics. The two parties today represent genuinely different constituencies and coalitions. The old liberal Republicans from the Northeast who Biden once had lots in common with are now gone. The new conservative Republicans from the South (who replaced the conservative Democrats) have little interest in consensus politics.

Moreover, in the 1970s and into the 1980s, Democrats appeared to have a lock on the House of Representatives, while Republicans appeared to mostly have an advantage in presidential elections. Nobody expected the balance of power to change all that much from election to election, and so there was not much sense holding out for partisan control to shift. Besides, both chambers were mostly decentralized committee-based institutions, where partisan leadership exerted minimal agenda control, so partisan control of the chamber didn’t matter as much.

This is very different today. Today, leadership in Congress is highly centralized, and control of the chamber means total agenda control. It’s a grand prize that demands high-stakes electoral fighting.

What Biden could have said instead
Rather than peddling a fantasy theory in which electing a Democrat to the White House causes a sudden epiphany of bipartisanship, Joe Biden couldhave said that the political incentives in our system are all screwed up, and that until they change, our politics is going to get even nastier. He could have said that if we want more functional politics, we’re going to need to change the winner-take-all electoral system that has created today’s zero-sum toxic politics.

But that would require some hard explaining. And sunny nostalgia is a much easier, on-brand sell.

But if Biden should have an epiphany of his own and become interested in tackling the hard problems of our broken political system, his staff should let me know — I can get him an advance copy of my forthcoming book. It explains how to change the political incentives so that compromise doesn’t rely on epiphanies that are unlikely to be forthcoming.
 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
source: New York Times


Joe Biden Draws Fire From Rivals Over Remarks About Segregationist Senators



merlin_156328227_793ee958-7cf2-4b8a-baf0-f2bda5856662-jumbo.jpg

Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. at a campaign event in Iowa last week. He invoked two Southern segregationist senators at a fund-raiser Tuesday night.CreditCreditRachel Mummey for The New York Times


Several Democratic presidential candidates sharply criticized Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Wednesday for invoking two Southern segregationist senators by name as he defended himself over accusations of being “old-fashioned” and fondly recalled the “civility” of the Senate in the 1970s and 1980s.

Mr. Biden, speaking at a fund-raiser at the Carlyle Hotel in New York City on Tuesday night, stressed the need to “be able to reach consensus under our system,” and cast his decades in the Senate as a time of relative comity. His remarks come as some in his party say that Mr. Biden, the former vice president, is too focused on overtures to the right as he seeks the Democratic presidential nomination.

[Mr. Biden lashed out at his rivals and declined to apologize on Wednesday.]

At the event, Mr. Biden noted that he served with the late Senators James O. Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia, both Democrats who were staunch opponents of desegregation. Mr. Eastland was the powerful chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee when Mr. Biden entered the chamber in 1973.

“I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,” said Mr. Biden, 76, slipping briefly into a Southern accent, according to a pool report from the fund-raiser. “He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son.’”

He called Mr. Talmadge “one of the meanest guys I ever knew, you go down the list of all these guys.”

“Well guess what?” Mr. Biden continued. “At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished. But today you look at the other side and you’re the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy. We don’t talk to each other anymore.”

On Wednesday, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, one of two black candidates running for president, said Mr. Biden was “wrong” to use segregationists as examples for bringing the country together.

merlin_156683490_c0718b59-e3e1-4dd0-8564-94bcb57197ac-jumbo.jpg

James O. Eastland, left, was the powerful chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee when Mr. Biden entered the chamber in 1973.CreditJohn Rous/Associated Press

“You don’t joke about calling black men ‘boys,’” Mr. Booker said in a statement. “I’m disappointed that he hasn’t issued an immediate apology for the pain his words are dredging up for many Americans. He should.” Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont later echoed Mr. Booker’s call for an apology.

Senator Kamala Harris of California, who is also black, said she found Mr. Biden’s comments concerning. “If those men had their way, I wouldn’t be in the United States Senate and on this elevator right now,” she said, referring to Mr. Eastland and Mr. Talmadge, according to ABC News.

Other presidential candidates weighed in as well. Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York posted a photo of his multiracial family on Twitter and cited a racial epithet that Mr. Eastland used.

“It’s 2019 & @JoeBiden is longing for the good old days of ‘civility’ typified by James Eastland,” Mr. de Blasio wrote. “It’s past time for apologies or evolution from @JoeBiden. He repeatedly demonstrates that he is out of step with the values of the modern Democratic Party.”




And former Representative John Delaney of Maryland said in a statement: “Evoking an avowed segregationist is not the best way to make the point that we need to work together and is insensitive; we need to learn from history but we also need to be aggressive in dismantling structural racism that exists today.”

Mr. Eastland, a plantation owner, was known as a vociferous opponent of integration efforts and a staunch critic of the civil rights movement, which he sometimes dismissed as the work of “communists.” Throughout his career he referred to African-Americans as members of an “inferior race” and used the racist term “mongrelization.”

Mr. Talmadge was also a critic of the civil rights movement and opposed the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, that declared racially segregated public schools unconstitutional.

Mr. Biden has long discussed his personal commitment to civil rights, and he has many strong relationships in the black community. He has also previously pointed to his dealings with segregationists like Mr. Eastland as an example of a time when Senate colleagues could disagree but still find ways to reach common ground.

But Mr. Biden is also now seeking the nomination of a party that is increasingly young and diverse — and skeptical of his emphasis on compromise, especially on issues that touch on matters of racial justice. His campaign declined to provide additional comment for this story.

19biden3-jumbo.jpg

Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey said Mr. Biden was “wrong” to invoke segregationists in the context of civility. “You don’t joke about calling black men ‘boys,’” he said.CreditGabriella Demczuk for The New York Times

“Folks, I believe one of the things I’m pretty good at is bringing people together,” Mr. Biden said. “Every time we had a trouble in the administration, who got sent to the Hill to settle it? Me. No, not a joke. Because I demonstrate respect for them.”

On Wednesday, Anita Dunn, an adviser to the Biden campaign and a veteran Democratic operative, appeared on MSNBC to defend Mr. Biden. “You have to be able to work with people, even if they hold positions that are repugnant to you,” she said, noting that Mr. Biden had clashed with the segregationist senators on the issues many times.

She also said that other Democratic candidates, including Mr. Booker and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, had worked with Republicans who “are espousing views that are anathema to many people in the Democratic Party when it comes to women’s rights, when it comes to immigration, when it comes to some pretty broad civil rights issues that all of us feel pretty strongly about in 2020, including Joe Biden.”

While Mr. Booker had been vocal earlier in the day about Mr. Biden’s remarks, Ms. Warren had not been. Her team didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, though later in the afternoon she told reporters that it was “never O.K. to celebrate segregationists. Never.”

Mr. Biden made the comments about Mr. Eastland and Mr. Talmadge on the eve of Juneteenth, the day that commemorates the end of slavery. His remarks came as he spoke about the need for unity, including a call for bipartisanship that has drawn derision from some liberals who don’t see room for compromise in today’s polarized Washington.

“I know the new New Left tells me that I’m — this is old-fashioned,” he said. “Well guess what? If we can’t reach a consensus in our system, what happens? It encourages and demands the abuse of power by a president.”

Mr. Biden’s appearance at the Carlyle was his third fund-raiser of the day. There and at previous stops, he implicitly suggested that bold actions on a range of issues could be achieved without anyone being “punished,” including the wealthy.

“I got in trouble with some of the people on my team, on the Democratic side, because I said, ‘You know what I’ve found is rich people are just as patriotic as poor people,’” he said. “Not a joke. I mean, we may not want to demonize anybody who has made money.”

At the same time, he warned, “when we have income inequality as large as we have in the United States today, it brews and ferments political discord and basic revolution.’’
 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
source: ABC News

Biden defends comments on segregationist Democrats after criticism from 2020 challengers

After a day of criticism from many 2020 presidential opponents, former Vice President Joe Biden is not apologizing for comments he made about finding consensus with Southern Democrats with opposing views while serving in the Senate -- including those who supported segregation.

But Biden went even one step further late Wednesday, saying Sen. Cory Booker should apologize for his own criticism.

The controversy began at a fundraiser in New York City Tuesday night when Biden spoke about the need for consensus to fix the "broken" political system, and recalled his time in the Senate serving alongside former Sens. James O. Eastland, of Mississippi, and Herman Talmadge, of Georgia. Eastland served as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee when Biden arrived in the Senate and both Eastland and Talmadge were deeply opposed to desegregation.

(MORE: Trump lashes out at Biden as 'the weakest mentally' as both travel to Iowa)
"I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland," Biden said to the crowd of donors during an evening fundraiser in New York City on Tuesday, according to a press pool report, briefly channeling the late Mississippi senator's Southern drawl.

Biden said of Eastland, "He never called me 'boy,' he always called me 'son.'"

The former vice president then brought up deceased Georgia Sen. Herman Talmage, "[He was] one of the meanest guys I ever knew, you go down the list of all these guys. Well, guess what? At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn't agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished. But today, you look at the other side and you're the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy. We don't talk to each other anymore."

joe-biden-ap-jef-190610_hpMain_4x3_992.jpg

Former vice president and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden speaks during a campaign event in Berlin, N.H., June 4, 2019.

Biden reiterated that he did not agree with the views those senators held outside a fundraiser in Chevy Chase, Maryland, Wednesday night.

"I could not have disagreed with Jim Eastland more. He was a segregationist. I ran for the United States Senate because I disagreed with the views of the segregationist -- many of them in the Senate at the time," Biden said.

"The point I'm making is you don't have to agree. You don't have to like the people in terms of their views. But you just have to simply make the case you beat them, you beat them without changing the system," he added.

Biden's initial comments drew criticism from some of his 2020 rivals, including Booker.

"You don't joke about calling black men 'boys.' Men like James O. Eastland used words like that, and the racist policies that accompanied them, to perpetuate white supremacy and strip black Americans of our very humanity," Booker, who participated Wednesday in a hearing on reparations for the descendants of slaves, said in a statement.

"Vice President Biden's relationships with proud segregationists are not the model for how we make America a safer and more inclusive place for black people, and for everyone. I have to tell Vice President Biden, as someone I respect, that he is wrong for using his relationships with Eastland and Talmadge as examples of how to bring our country together. And frankly, I'm disappointed that he hasn't issued an immediate apology for the pain his words are dredging up for many Americans. He should," Booker continued.

But when asked if he would issue an apology, Biden made it clear Wednesday night he did not believe he had a reason to.

"Apologize for what?" Biden asked.

"Cory should apologize. He knows better. There's not a racist bone in my body. I've been involved in civil rights my whole career. Period. Period. Period."

cory-booker-reparations-ap-jef-190619_hpEmbed_2_3x2_992.jpg

Sen. Cory Booker testifies about reparation for the descendants of slaves during a hearing before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, at the Capitol in Washington, June 19, 2019.

In his comments Wednesday night Biden also pointed to his support for the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting, and the extensions he was able to pass on the act while in the Senate. That position put Biden at odds with segregationist like Sen. Strom Thurmond, of South Carolina, who served as chair of the Senate Judiciary committee from 1981 to 1987.

Biden's comments Tuesday night were not the first time Biden spoke about his relationship with senators who supported segregation.

"When I first got started, it was a very different circumstance. The politics wasn't broken, but the American people were in overwhelming disagreement. On the war in Vietnam, the women's movement, the civil rights movement are bitter, bitter fights. When I got there, there were still five, seven segregationists from the south were part of the Democratic Party. ... But the politics wasn't broken in the sense that we still treat each other with some civility," Biden said in Concord, New Hampshire, earlier this month.

Biden has also recalled Eastland's offer to come and campaign for or against him in Delaware -- whichever would help more in his reelection efforts -- as he did in 2016.

"I was running for reelection in 1978. And I walked into the Senate dining room when we were trying to wind down everything. We had no appointments, just voting around the clock, Biden said during a speech at the Pittsburgh Labor Day parade in 2016.

"And I walked in -- true story -- and I got -- old Eastland looked at me. He never called me senator. He always called me ‘son.' He says, ‘Son, come over here and sit down a minute.' And I went over and sat down," Biden recalled at the time. "He said, ‘What can old Jim Eastland do for you in Delaware?' … I said, ‘Mr. Chairman, some places you'd help and some places you'd hurt.' "[Eastland] said, ‘Well, I'll come to Delaware and campaign for you or against you, whichever will help the most."

While on the campaign trail Biden has often talked about the need for consensus in order to make the political system work, which often requires working together to accomplish goals, despite differences in beliefs.

Booker was not the only 2020 Democrat to criticize Biden for the comments.

Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., said Biden's comments on Eastland and Talmadge were "misinformed and wrong."

"I have a great deal of respect for Vice President Biden. He's done very good work and he's served our country in a very noble way. But to coddle the reputations of segregationists -- of people who, if they had their way, I would literally not be standing here as a member of the U.S. Senate, is, I think, is just misinformed and wrong," Harris told reporters outside the U.S. Capitol Wednesday. "Let's be very clear that the senators that he is speaking of with such adoration are individuals who made and built their reputation on segregation."

"I appreciate the importance of working with people and finding common ground. But to to suggest that individuals who literally made it their life's work to take America back on the issue of race is a real problem for me. And it's a very serious issue," she added.

Fellow candidate New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio slammed Biden for his comments, tweeting that Eastland believed his interracial family should be illegal.

"It's 2019 & @JoeBiden is longing for the good old days of 'civility' typified by James Eastland. Eastland thought my multiracial family should be illegal & that whites were entitled to "the pursuit of dead n******. It's past time for apologies or evolution from @JoeBiden. He repeatedly demonstrates that he is out of step with the values of the modern Democratic Party," de Blasio tweeted Wednesday.



Other presidential hopefuls refrained from hitting Biden directly but made clear that they did not agree with his views.

"I'm not here to criticize other Democrats, but it's never ok to celebrate segregationists. Never," Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said Wednesday avoiding mentioning Biden by name.

Former Maryland Rep. John Delaney was similarly reflective, saying, "Evoking an avowed segregationist is not the best way to make the point that we need to work together and is insensitive; we need to learn from history but we also need to be aggressive in dismantling structural racism that exists today."

Symone Sanders, a senior adviser for the Biden campaign, defended the former vice president's comments, making it clear the vice president was not praising Eastland and Talmadge and calling the insinuation he did "disingenuous."



"@JoeBiden did not praise a segregationist. That is a disingenuous take. He basically said sometimes in Congress, one has to work with terrible or downright racist folks to get things done. And then went on to say when you can't work with them, work around them," Sanders tweeted Wednesday afternoon.

"Joe Biden has been an ally in the fight for civil rights for years. I am all here for VALID CRITICISM, but suggesting that Joe Biden -- the man who literally ran for office against an incumbent at 29 because of the civil rights movement, the man who was at the forefront of marriage equality before it was politically popular, the man who served as President Obama's VP, the man who literally launched his 2020 campaign calling out Nazis in Charlottesville along with Trump's equivalency -- suggesting he is actively praising a segregationist is just a bad take and a willfully disingenuous act," Sanders continued.

House Majority Whip James Clyburn, of South Carolina, a senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus and the highest ranking black lawmaker, defended Biden in comments to Politico saying that the business of governance sometimes requires working with people with distasteful views. Biden is one of 22 candidates expected to attend Clyburn's famous fish fry before the South Carolina Democratic Convention -- a must-stop event on the campaign trail in a state with a high number of black voters.

"I worked with Strom Thurmond all my life," Clyburn said of Thurmond, who was known for his staunch segregationist views. "You don't have to agree with people to work with them."
 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
source: Essence


HOME · OP-ED
Op-ed: Joe Biden Is The White Moderate Dr. King Warned Us About
JOE BIDEN, FORMER U.S. VICE-PRESIDENT, AND 2020 DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE, SHARED FOND MEMORIES TUESDAY NIGHT OF JAMES O. EASTLAND, THE WHITE SUPREMACIST MISSISSIPPI SENATOR KNOWN AS “THE VOICE OF THE WHITE SOUTH,” CALLING HIM “SON.”​

joe-biden_1-1280x720.jpg



BY KIRSTEN WEST SAVALI · JUNE 19, 2019

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.” — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Joe Biden, the architect of the 1994 Crime Bill and former U.S. Vice-President, is not as slick as he thinks he is. In fact, he’s a cliché, a stock photo, an avatar, for every single liberal white man who believes that just because he’s not a member of the Republican Party or an adherent to the most virulent white supremacist policies, that he can disguise his rancid racism behind “Aw shucks, I just tell it like it is” performative politic-ing and Black people will just fall in line.

Because at least he’s not Donald Trump.

He proved that again Tuesday night at an NYC fundraiser, during which he reportedly told the crowd that he and James O. Eastland, the long-serving, segregationist, white supremacist Mississippi senator known as “The Voice of the White South,” and the “Godfather of Mississippi Politics”, shared a mutual fondness and respect for each other.

The senator from Delaware reportedly stated, “I know the new New Left tells me that I’m — this is old-fashioned. Well guess what? If we can’t reach a consensus in our system, what happens? It encourages and demands the abuse of power by a president.”

“I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,” Biden continued, reportedly slipping into a southern drawl. “He never called me boy, he always called me son.”



Because Eastland was a refined man, you see. A civil man who only used “boy” to reinforce a racist power dynamic and dehumanize the “ni—ers” he hated so much—never Biden.

Later reports added that Biden also mentioned his fondness for segregationist Georgia Gov. Herman Talmadge, saying of both of the white supremacists, “At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished. But today you look at the other side and you’re the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy. We don’t talk to each other anymore.”

It makes sense, then that while Biden’s daddy was wreaking havoc in the lives of Black Mississippians, Biden was a crusader for anti-integration, anti-busing policies and actively courting Eastland’s support.

In a March 25, 1977 letter, Biden wrote his mentor, who at the time served as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, these words:

“Dear Mr. Chairman, I want you to know that I very much appreciate your help during this week’s committee meeting in attempting to bring my anti-busing legislation to a vote.”

Eastland worked closely with the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a state-sponsored white terrorist organization that aided and abetted in the assassinations of Black civil rights leaders—and surveilled others, including my grandparents. Yet, he was apparently not only a model of civility for Biden, but a political accomplice.

In asking Eastland to speak on the Senate Floor in favor of his anti-busing bill, Biden wrote the man, who once called Black people “an inferior race,” another note on Aug. 22, 1978, pleading, “I want to personally ask your continued support and alert you to our intentions. Your participation in floor debate would be welcomed.”

Be clear: Former President Barack Obama may consider Biden to be his BFF, but the man cannot be trusted. He is making it plain that he will beat Trump at his own game, twisting the knife of white supremacy deeper still into the core of this nation with a smile on his face and a song in his heart.

Democrats, is this your king?

If not, they need to make it plain now, because it is past time, but potentially too late, for this so-called “progressive” party to reckon with itself.

Whether it looks like 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris previously threatening Black mothers with prison time if their children were truant from school; or New York City Mayor, or 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, Bill de Blasio refusing to stand with the family of Eric Garner in demanding the release of killer Daniel Pantaleo’s disciplinary record; or former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel closing public schools in Chicago and participating in the cover-up of the extrajudicial killing of Laquan McDonald; or not one police officer being convicted of federal hate crimes under the Eric Holder-helmed Justice Department during the Obama administration for the state-sanctioned killing of a Black person, it is clear that the Democratic Party cannot be exempt from excavating its own devils.

Even those, especially those, with a twinkle in their sparkling blue eyes.

“As far as I’m concerned, ‘liberal’ is the most meaningless word in the dictionary.” — Assata Shakur
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Harris continues post-debate surge but Biden still leads polls


Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) continued to rise in polls following her breakout debate performance last week, jumping into a near tie with former Vice President Joe Biden in a Quinnipiac University survey released Tuesday. The poll found that 22 percent of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters backed Biden, while 20 percent backed Harris.

In last month's poll, Biden had 30 percent and Harris had 7 percent. Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) trailed with 14 percent and 13 percent, respectively.

A Washington Post-ABC News survey released Wednesday told a different story. Given a list of the 22 Democratic candidates:

29 percent of respondents said they supported Biden for the Democratic nomination;

Sanders got 23 percent; and

Harris and Warren had 11 percent.​


Source: NBC News, The Washington Post


.
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Why black Joe Biden supporters in SC remain loyal, despite his record on race


BY EMMA DUMAIN AND
MAAYAN SCHECHTER
JULY 05, 2019 05:00 AM L


COLUMBIA, S.C. — At a downtown restaurant — amid the noise of silverware clinking, servers taking orders and diners chatting — Denae Pearson stared intently at a television screen where a defining moment of the first round of Democratic presidential primary debates was unfolding.


U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris of California was calling out former Vice President Joe Biden for his opposition to integrating Delaware schools through the practice of busing. Biden was a U.S. senator from that state at that time, the 1970s.
A black woman who benefited from busing in California as a young girl, Harris put Biden on the defensive: “That little girl was me,” she said in a line now emblazoned on her campaign T-shirts along with her childhood photo.​


The confrontation was riveting political theater to the dozens, including Pearson, who had gathered for the debate watch party. Among political observers, it was billed as a breakout moment for Harris that helped boost her poll numbers nationally and in Iowa, whose voters will be first to weigh in on the Democratic primary, in which 24 candidates are seeking the nomination.

For Biden, the perceived front-runner, the moment spelled trouble, with those same national pundits speculating Harris’ performance could peel away Biden’s black voter support.


But on that night, Pearson — whose parents went to segregated schools — was still with Biden: the man she met a week before at U.S. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn’s “World Famous Fish Fry” who impressed her with his stance on health care.

“I support him,” said the 34-year-old Columbia resident. “I am a black woman. I get where he’s coming from.”


NOT MONOLITHIC

Pearson is not unique among the black S.C. voters who spoke to The State for this report.

Over the past month, The State conducted 38 formal interviews and had nearly a dozen more conversations with black S.C. voters, Democratic leaders and political experts to test the assumption — fueled by early polls and pushed by national media — that Biden is the favorite to win South Carolina’s pivotal presidential primary.

The State asked 29 black S.C. voters which candidates they planned to vote for in the state’s first-in-the-South primary, including eight public figures and civic leaders. Reporters also interviewed five black elected officials from outside South Carolina with ties to southern constituencies, two black Democratic activists and two political scientists who have studied black voting patterns.

Nationally, a Reuters/Ipsos poll shows Biden slipping: while four out of 10 black voters supported Biden before the debate during which he clashed with Harris, in a post-debate poll only two in 10 said they would pick him. No polls so far, however, have definitively measured how the candidates are doing among black voters in South Carolina.

Both Biden and Harris are set to visit the state this weekend for the first time since the June 27 debate, which will provide a glimpse into how voters now feel about the contenders.


Still, though far from definitive, The State’s interviews give strong insight into the attitudes toward Biden driving his support among black S.C. voters, who make up more than 60% of the Democratic electorate.

Unsurprisingly, The State found black S.C. voters are far from monolithic regarding their political views and preferred candidates. At the same time, for the many who said they were supporting or leaning toward Biden, their explanations shared many similarities.

Even as Biden’s record on race complicates his standing among black voters nationally, many African Americans across generations in South Carolina told The State they do not associate themselves with the criticism the former vice president has received.


They said enthusiasm for Biden’s candidacy derives from a combination of strategic thinking about who can beat President Donald Trump and a deep emotional connection to the man who served alongside Barack Obama, the country’s first black president.

And older black voters said they trust Biden to unite the country. If they turn out in large numbers next year — as they did in 2016, when the over-45 age bracket represented more than 70% of those participating in the S.C. Democratic presidential primary — that sensibility could prevail.

Here is a deeper look at what The State found, in voters’ own words.


‘NOBODY’S CLEAN’
In South Carolina, many black Democrats leaning toward Biden worry his inability to confront critics could turn off undecided voters.

“He will definitely sabotage his efforts,” Craig Khanwell, 53, who also attended last month’s debate watch party, told The State. He was eyeing Biden among others, including Harris and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

“The black electorate is becoming more and more enlightened to their own self interests in South Carolina now,” Khanwell continued. “It’s not like in the past when you had a few black leaders, or black politicians or black preachers who can tell black people how to vote. That’s just not going to happen in this election.”

Prominent backers of other candidates, particularly supporters of Harris, see an opportunity to convert voters to their side.

“Joe Biden’s supporters are extremely soft, extremely fluid and can go to other people,” argued CNN contributor and former Democratic state Rep. Bakari Sellers, a Denmark native who has endorsed Harris. “You see how well he’s performing among African American women. As Kamala Harris continues to plow that ground, a lot of people will migrate in (her) direction.”

Prior to the debate, Biden raised eyebrows when he bragged about working with pro-segregationist senators as proof he’s a consensus builder. Yet again and again, voters told The State the comments were not deal-breakers in whether to give Biden their support.

“Nobody’s clean,” Debora Hayes, of Columbia, said last month while waiting outside the fish fry gates to see Biden. “They are going to find something on everybody at some point.”

Biden’s comments “weren’t (offensive) to me,” said York resident Joyce Wilson, 53, who recently was still deciding between Biden, Harris and U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. “(But) the news media just beat it, beat it, beat it and that kind of thing will cause divisiveness.”

State Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter, an influential Orangeburg Democrat who doesn’t endorse in primaries, said she offered Biden unsolicited advice that he should apologize for his controversial remark.

“I was not offended by it, but there are some who were, and so what’s the big deal?” Cobb-Hunter told The State at the Democratic party’s state convention. “If enough people say, ‘Look, your remarks were insensitive and show a lack of awareness,’ then I think it would be appropriate for him to say, ‘I’m sorry. My remarks were not taken as I intended.’”

Clyburn, the state’s most influential Democrat, said it was not surprising that many black S.C. voters are either standing by Biden or unfazed by his comments.

In South Carolina, a state with a painful history of racial violence, older African Americans remember a time when politicians like Biden were few and far between, Clyburn explained — white politicians who, while maybe flawed, were seen as sympathetic to the African American cause of civil rights and strove to do the right thing.

“The black community, as a whole, has a very long history of being lied to,” said Clyburn, who will turn 79 years old this month and has promised not to make a formal endorsement. “The reason there is distrust of politicians is because you promise them one thing, you double cross them later. I grew up with that. I know that is a very strong feeling in the African American community. They have a different experience with Joe Biden.”

That different experience could explain why many older black voters reject the premise that Biden should be punished for his work in helping draft the 1994 crime bill, which critics say destroyed black families and ballooned the prison population.

U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., a Texas-raised Methodist preacher and former Congressional Black Caucus chairman, supported the crime bill as the then-mayor of Kansas City, as did Clyburn. Both men said older African Americans can recall when such a measure was necessary.

“I just hit my 40th year in the ministry, and two-thirds of all the preachers I know supported the crime bill — black preachers,” said Cleaver, 74. “Like me, they were doing funerals every other week of people murdered out of gang violence. For the first time churches had started hiring guards. ... Everywhere was just a manifestation of crime and people were saying, ‘We gotta do something.’”

Sellers insisted there would be a generational backlash to Biden’s record on race and support for the crime bill.

“I know the response is going to be ... ‘Bakari Sellers was 10 years old when the ‘94 crime bill was passed, he doesn’t know,’” he said. “We’re still living with the ramifications, and there are still generations of black men who are being taken away now.”

But as long as older voters turn out in the highest numbers, theirs could be the prevailing sentiment, said Winthrop University political scientist Scott Huffmon, who oversees a long-running S.C. public opinion survey.

“Younger voters, in general, could ... eclipse the older voters, but they’re not going to,” said Huffmon, the only white person interviewed for this story. “Just because they are literally larger than, say, the baby boomers, they’re not going to turn out.”


upload_2019-7-6_9-8-2.jpeg
Vice President Joe Biden interacts with visitors on Capitol Hill in Washington this week. Sait Serkan GurbuzASSOCIATED PRESS


HIGHER STAKES WITH TRUMP
Michael Bailey, of Columbia, who works with the S.C. Democratic Party’s Black Caucus, disagreed with Huffmon and others who discount younger voters.

At age 44 and drawn to both Harris and Sanders, Bailey conceded at one time he wouldn’t have thought younger black voters would turn out to the polls.

“But, as we know with the current occupant of the White House, anything can happen,” he said. “It’s a whole new generation of young Democratic voters that came in when Obama ran. Obama brought them to the polls. They’re not feeling Biden.”

Bailey could be right that Biden isn’t resonating with younger voters. But if older voters turn out in the largest numbers, as trends predict, their votes could reflect a more conservative and pragmatic sensibility from which Biden benefits.

This is Theodore Johnson’s prediction.

A senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School who wrote his doctoral dissertation on black voting behavior and is himself black, Johnson said that African Americans over the age of 45 “tend to be more risk-averse in how they exercise their vote.”

These older black voters, particularly in the South, tend to favor more conservative candidates because they perceive such candidates as being more electable than unyielding progressives, Johnson said. In this left-leaning primary field, Biden is considered a centrist.

And black voters old enough to recall the terrors of Jim Crow, Johnson added, have “a sense that the vote is too important to exercise based on gut instinct and ... a dream of what you would love to happen if the world were perfect.”

This theory guided many black S.C. voters in 2008, when Obama was seen as too much of a risk compared to Hillary Clinton. Once white voters rallied behind Obama in the Iowa Caucus, black South Carolinians delivered him the state’s primary election.

Sellers said a similar scenario could happen in 2020 to benefit Harris — if not the other prominent black Democratic 2020 candidate, U.S. Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey.

However, the stakes feel higher for many black voters now than they did in 2008, seeing in Trump a president they believe does not deliver policies that help the African American community.

“African Americans understand that they have so much to lose with the re-election of President Trump,” said U.S. Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-La., a national Biden campaign co-chairman. “You’re not just talking about Roe v. Wade. You’re talking about a Supreme Court that could roll back Brown v. Board of Education, race used in college admissions. … There’s a bunch of things that are hanging out there that could decimate the African American community.”

The theory of the black vote as largely pragmatic actually underscores a sentiment expressed by nearly all the black S.C. Democrats interviewed by The State, across generations: Defeating Trump is the top priority in 2020, and there’s a belief that Biden can pull it off.

“Biden is the strongest candidate that can beat Trump,” said William Fairfax, a 21-year-old Claflin University student, pointing to Trump’s tweets targeting Biden as evidence Republicans see the former vice president as their biggest threat.

“(Biden) does not shy away from standing up to a bully,” Richmond, also a former Congressional Black Caucus chairman, added.

More than a dozen black S.C. voters interviewed by The State said Biden, 76, could run on being a seasoned politician who spent nearly four decades in electoral politics, plus another eight years in the White House.

“He’s been in politics for a long time, and I think he’s the best candidate to beat Trump,” said Jeffery Lytes, 49, of Lexington.

“I’m real high on experience, and I’m real impressed with the experience he has,” added state Sen. Kevin Johnson, D-Clarendon. “I think he’s the right person to bring us to victory.”

Dorothy Craig, a 56-year-old from Union who has “pretty much” decided to vote for Biden because of his experience, agreed.

“I just feel like he has the experience. I feel like we need someone who has that same experience to go back in and put it back in order.”


upload_2019-7-6_9-6-37.jpeg
President Barack Obama hugs Vice President Joe Biden after giving his presidential farewell address. Charles Rex Arbogast AP


‘FOND MEMORIES’
Biden’s tie to Obama’s tenure is motivation enough for some black S.C. voters to back him.

Travis and Cynthia Keller of Irmo — a couple in their 40s — said the 2010 Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare,” is what has helped guarantee their 11-year-old son, a three-time organ transplant recipient, gets the coverage and treatment he needs.

“We know that Joe will fight for us,“ Cynthia Keller said.

Nina Turner, former Ohio state senator and the African American co-chairwoman of Sanders’ 2020 campaign, dismissed the argument that Biden’s Obama connection would motivate primary voters.

“This is not about proximity to the first African American president,” she said. “Just because we have fond memories of somebody (doesn’t mean) we’re just going to automatically give them our vote versus people having to earn their vote every time they run.”

Yet in interview after interview, black S.C. voters said they could vouch for Biden’s character largely because of Obama.

“He’s spent eight years with President Obama,” said Columbia’s Yolanda Anderson, a Richland 1 school board member. “And, in my opinion, he has that same kind of feel.”

Asked why he was voting for Biden, Denmark resident Michael Cooper, 50, replied, “because he supported Barack Obama and (Biden) is the most qualified candidate who can help us restore America.”

Bailey, the Black Caucus spokesman, again argued S.C. support for Biden in the black community was split along generational lines.

“I don’t see young black people rushing out to the polls to support Joe Biden,” he said. “I see older blacks in church supporting Biden because that was Obama’s VP. And that’s the name they know and they’re not doing more research.”

Still, many black South Carolinians insisted they just had a certain good feeling about Biden, indicating that while some see a vote for Biden as a good strategy, others plan to vote for him out of a deep emotional connection.

That Biden has vacationed on Kiawah Island for years and made other sporadic visits to the state also makes him a familiar local presence that gives South Carolinians a feeling they really know him.

“You hear people say they trust him, you hear people say they know him,” said Antjuan Seawright, a South Carolina-based Democratic strategist. “They feel like he’s the best fit to beat Trump. It all goes back to trust.”


‘THIS LONG HISTORY’
Some black S.C. voters suggested for the good of the party — and in order to defeat Trump — Harris and Biden should put aside differences.

“I don’t think we need to do the infighting and I see it already,” said 62-year-old Brenda Peterson, of Columbia. “And I don’t think it’s a good thing for our platform. That’s what the general public is going to see. They’re going to see that you’re fighting already.”

Yet if Biden’s goal is to win over undecided black voters, such as 31-year-old Jason Belton of Blythewood, he might need to acknowledge the episode.

“It’s going to hurt if you’re not humble and don’t apologize,” Belton said.

Biden could have that opportunity in South Carolina this weekend.

In the meantime, Clyburn doesn’t understand why support for Biden’s candidacy is hard to understand.

“It seems like people do not to want to accept the fact that Joe Biden has this long history, and if you just look at the most recent history, for eight years, he’s been this partner of the first African American president in this United States of America,” Clyburn said. “And that partner said publicly some time ago that of all the decisions he made, the decision to take on Joe Biden as his running mate was the best decision he ever made.”

For some Biden supporters, their decision for the Feb. 29 presidential primary isn’t complicated at all.

Ruth Martin, 78, told The State at Clyburn’s fish fry she’ll vote for Biden because she’s “known” him for years.

“Not known him personally,” she clarified, “but known him for a long time, known his character. I would be happy to go with him.”


FOLLOW MORE OF OUR REPORTING ON

Read more here: https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/election/article231926968.html#storylink=cpy


.
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Why black Joe Biden supporters in SC remain loyal, despite his record on race


BY EMMA DUMAIN AND
MAAYAN SCHECHTER
JULY 05, 2019 05:00 AM L


COLUMBIA, S.C. — At a downtown restaurant — amid the noise of silverware clinking, servers taking orders and diners chatting — Denae Pearson stared intently at a television screen where a defining moment of the first round of Democratic presidential primary debates was unfolding.


U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris of California was calling out former Vice President Joe Biden for his opposition to integrating Delaware schools through the practice of busing. Biden was a U.S. senator from that state at that time, the 1970s.
A black woman who benefited from busing in California as a young girl, Harris put Biden on the defensive: “That little girl was me,” she said in a line now emblazoned on her campaign T-shirts along with her childhood photo.​


The confrontation was riveting political theater to the dozens, including Pearson, who had gathered for the debate watch party. Among political observers, it was billed as a breakout moment for Harris that helped boost her poll numbers nationally and in Iowa, whose voters will be first to weigh in on the Democratic primary, in which 24 candidates are seeking the nomination.

For Biden, the perceived front-runner, the moment spelled trouble, with those same national pundits speculating Harris’ performance could peel away Biden’s black voter support.


But on that night, Pearson — whose parents went to segregated schools — was still with Biden: the man she met a week before at U.S. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn’s “World Famous Fish Fry” who impressed her with his stance on health care.

“I support him,” said the 34-year-old Columbia resident. “I am a black woman. I get where he’s coming from.”


NOT MONOLITHIC

Pearson is not unique among the black S.C. voters who spoke to The State for this report.

Over the past month, The State conducted 38 formal interviews and had nearly a dozen more conversations with black S.C. voters, Democratic leaders and political experts to test the assumption — fueled by early polls and pushed by national media — that Biden is the favorite to win South Carolina’s pivotal presidential primary.

The State asked 29 black S.C. voters which candidates they planned to vote for in the state’s first-in-the-South primary, including eight public figures and civic leaders. Reporters also interviewed five black elected officials from outside South Carolina with ties to southern constituencies, two black Democratic activists and two political scientists who have studied black voting patterns.

Nationally, a Reuters/Ipsos poll shows Biden slipping: while four out of 10 black voters supported Biden before the debate during which he clashed with Harris, in a post-debate poll only two in 10 said they would pick him. No polls so far, however, have definitively measured how the candidates are doing among black voters in South Carolina.

Both Biden and Harris are set to visit the state this weekend for the first time since the June 27 debate, which will provide a glimpse into how voters now feel about the contenders.


Still, though far from definitive, The State’s interviews give strong insight into the attitudes toward Biden driving his support among black S.C. voters, who make up more than 60% of the Democratic electorate.

Unsurprisingly, The State found black S.C. voters are far from monolithic regarding their political views and preferred candidates. At the same time, for the many who said they were supporting or leaning toward Biden, their explanations shared many similarities.

Even as Biden’s record on race complicates his standing among black voters nationally, many African Americans across generations in South Carolina told The State they do not associate themselves with the criticism the former vice president has received.


They said enthusiasm for Biden’s candidacy derives from a combination of strategic thinking about who can beat President Donald Trump and a deep emotional connection to the man who served alongside Barack Obama, the country’s first black president.

And older black voters said they trust Biden to unite the country. If they turn out in large numbers next year — as they did in 2016, when the over-45 age bracket represented more than 70% of those participating in the S.C. Democratic presidential primary — that sensibility could prevail.

Here is a deeper look at what The State found, in voters’ own words.


‘NOBODY’S CLEAN’
In South Carolina, many black Democrats leaning toward Biden worry his inability to confront critics could turn off undecided voters.

“He will definitely sabotage his efforts,” Craig Khanwell, 53, who also attended last month’s debate watch party, told The State. He was eyeing Biden among others, including Harris and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

“The black electorate is becoming more and more enlightened to their own self interests in South Carolina now,” Khanwell continued. “It’s not like in the past when you had a few black leaders, or black politicians or black preachers who can tell black people how to vote. That’s just not going to happen in this election.”

Prominent backers of other candidates, particularly supporters of Harris, see an opportunity to convert voters to their side.

“Joe Biden’s supporters are extremely soft, extremely fluid and can go to other people,” argued CNN contributor and former Democratic state Rep. Bakari Sellers, a Denmark native who has endorsed Harris. “You see how well he’s performing among African American women. As Kamala Harris continues to plow that ground, a lot of people will migrate in (her) direction.”

Prior to the debate, Biden raised eyebrows when he bragged about working with pro-segregationist senators as proof he’s a consensus builder. Yet again and again, voters told The State the comments were not deal-breakers in whether to give Biden their support.

“Nobody’s clean,” Debora Hayes, of Columbia, said last month while waiting outside the fish fry gates to see Biden. “They are going to find something on everybody at some point.”

Biden’s comments “weren’t (offensive) to me,” said York resident Joyce Wilson, 53, who recently was still deciding between Biden, Harris and U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. “(But) the news media just beat it, beat it, beat it and that kind of thing will cause divisiveness.”

State Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter, an influential Orangeburg Democrat who doesn’t endorse in primaries, said she offered Biden unsolicited advice that he should apologize for his controversial remark.

“I was not offended by it, but there are some who were, and so what’s the big deal?” Cobb-Hunter told The State at the Democratic party’s state convention. “If enough people say, ‘Look, your remarks were insensitive and show a lack of awareness,’ then I think it would be appropriate for him to say, ‘I’m sorry. My remarks were not taken as I intended.’”

Clyburn, the state’s most influential Democrat, said it was not surprising that many black S.C. voters are either standing by Biden or unfazed by his comments.

In South Carolina, a state with a painful history of racial violence, older African Americans remember a time when politicians like Biden were few and far between, Clyburn explained — white politicians who, while maybe flawed, were seen as sympathetic to the African American cause of civil rights and strove to do the right thing.

“The black community, as a whole, has a very long history of being lied to,” said Clyburn, who will turn 79 years old this month and has promised not to make a formal endorsement. “The reason there is distrust of politicians is because you promise them one thing, you double cross them later. I grew up with that. I know that is a very strong feeling in the African American community. They have a different experience with Joe Biden.”

That different experience could explain why many older black voters reject the premise that Biden should be punished for his work in helping draft the 1994 crime bill, which critics say destroyed black families and ballooned the prison population.

U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., a Texas-raised Methodist preacher and former Congressional Black Caucus chairman, supported the crime bill as the then-mayor of Kansas City, as did Clyburn. Both men said older African Americans can recall when such a measure was necessary.

“I just hit my 40th year in the ministry, and two-thirds of all the preachers I know supported the crime bill — black preachers,” said Cleaver, 74. “Like me, they were doing funerals every other week of people murdered out of gang violence. For the first time churches had started hiring guards. ... Everywhere was just a manifestation of crime and people were saying, ‘We gotta do something.’”

Sellers insisted there would be a generational backlash to Biden’s record on race and support for the crime bill.

“I know the response is going to be ... ‘Bakari Sellers was 10 years old when the ‘94 crime bill was passed, he doesn’t know,’” he said. “We’re still living with the ramifications, and there are still generations of black men who are being taken away now.”

But as long as older voters turn out in the highest numbers, theirs could be the prevailing sentiment, said Winthrop University political scientist Scott Huffmon, who oversees a long-running S.C. public opinion survey.

“Younger voters, in general, could ... eclipse the older voters, but they’re not going to,” said Huffmon, the only white person interviewed for this story. “Just because they are literally larger than, say, the baby boomers, they’re not going to turn out.”


View attachment 2283
Vice President Joe Biden interacts with visitors on Capitol Hill in Washington this week. Sait Serkan GurbuzASSOCIATED PRESS


HIGHER STAKES WITH TRUMP
Michael Bailey, of Columbia, who works with the S.C. Democratic Party’s Black Caucus, disagreed with Huffmon and others who discount younger voters.

At age 44 and drawn to both Harris and Sanders, Bailey conceded at one time he wouldn’t have thought younger black voters would turn out to the polls.

“But, as we know with the current occupant of the White House, anything can happen,” he said. “It’s a whole new generation of young Democratic voters that came in when Obama ran. Obama brought them to the polls. They’re not feeling Biden.”

Bailey could be right that Biden isn’t resonating with younger voters. But if older voters turn out in the largest numbers, as trends predict, their votes could reflect a more conservative and pragmatic sensibility from which Biden benefits.

This is Theodore Johnson’s prediction.

A senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School who wrote his doctoral dissertation on black voting behavior and is himself black, Johnson said that African Americans over the age of 45 “tend to be more risk-averse in how they exercise their vote.”

These older black voters, particularly in the South, tend to favor more conservative candidates because they perceive such candidates as being more electable than unyielding progressives, Johnson said. In this left-leaning primary field, Biden is considered a centrist.

And black voters old enough to recall the terrors of Jim Crow, Johnson added, have “a sense that the vote is too important to exercise based on gut instinct and ... a dream of what you would love to happen if the world were perfect.”

This theory guided many black S.C. voters in 2008, when Obama was seen as too much of a risk compared to Hillary Clinton. Once white voters rallied behind Obama in the Iowa Caucus, black South Carolinians delivered him the state’s primary election.

Sellers said a similar scenario could happen in 2020 to benefit Harris — if not the other prominent black Democratic 2020 candidate, U.S. Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey.

However, the stakes feel higher for many black voters now than they did in 2008, seeing in Trump a president they believe does not deliver policies that help the African American community.

“African Americans understand that they have so much to lose with the re-election of President Trump,” said U.S. Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-La., a national Biden campaign co-chairman. “You’re not just talking about Roe v. Wade. You’re talking about a Supreme Court that could roll back Brown v. Board of Education, race used in college admissions. … There’s a bunch of things that are hanging out there that could decimate the African American community.”

The theory of the black vote as largely pragmatic actually underscores a sentiment expressed by nearly all the black S.C. Democrats interviewed by The State, across generations: Defeating Trump is the top priority in 2020, and there’s a belief that Biden can pull it off.

“Biden is the strongest candidate that can beat Trump,” said William Fairfax, a 21-year-old Claflin University student, pointing to Trump’s tweets targeting Biden as evidence Republicans see the former vice president as their biggest threat.

“(Biden) does not shy away from standing up to a bully,” Richmond, also a former Congressional Black Caucus chairman, added.

More than a dozen black S.C. voters interviewed by The State said Biden, 76, could run on being a seasoned politician who spent nearly four decades in electoral politics, plus another eight years in the White House.

“He’s been in politics for a long time, and I think he’s the best candidate to beat Trump,” said Jeffery Lytes, 49, of Lexington.

“I’m real high on experience, and I’m real impressed with the experience he has,” added state Sen. Kevin Johnson, D-Clarendon. “I think he’s the right person to bring us to victory.”

Dorothy Craig, a 56-year-old from Union who has “pretty much” decided to vote for Biden because of his experience, agreed.

“I just feel like he has the experience. I feel like we need someone who has that same experience to go back in and put it back in order.”


View attachment 2282
President Barack Obama hugs Vice President Joe Biden after giving his presidential farewell address. Charles Rex Arbogast AP


‘FOND MEMORIES’
Biden’s tie to Obama’s tenure is motivation enough for some black S.C. voters to back him.

Travis and Cynthia Keller of Irmo — a couple in their 40s — said the 2010 Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare,” is what has helped guarantee their 11-year-old son, a three-time organ transplant recipient, gets the coverage and treatment he needs.

“We know that Joe will fight for us,“ Cynthia Keller said.

Nina Turner, former Ohio state senator and the African American co-chairwoman of Sanders’ 2020 campaign, dismissed the argument that Biden’s Obama connection would motivate primary voters.

“This is not about proximity to the first African American president,” she said. “Just because we have fond memories of somebody (doesn’t mean) we’re just going to automatically give them our vote versus people having to earn their vote every time they run.”

Yet in interview after interview, black S.C. voters said they could vouch for Biden’s character largely because of Obama.

“He’s spent eight years with President Obama,” said Columbia’s Yolanda Anderson, a Richland 1 school board member. “And, in my opinion, he has that same kind of feel.”

Asked why he was voting for Biden, Denmark resident Michael Cooper, 50, replied, “because he supported Barack Obama and (Biden) is the most qualified candidate who can help us restore America.”

Bailey, the Black Caucus spokesman, again argued S.C. support for Biden in the black community was split along generational lines.

“I don’t see young black people rushing out to the polls to support Joe Biden,” he said. “I see older blacks in church supporting Biden because that was Obama’s VP. And that’s the name they know and they’re not doing more research.”

Still, many black South Carolinians insisted they just had a certain good feeling about Biden, indicating that while some see a vote for Biden as a good strategy, others plan to vote for him out of a deep emotional connection.

That Biden has vacationed on Kiawah Island for years and made other sporadic visits to the state also makes him a familiar local presence that gives South Carolinians a feeling they really know him.

“You hear people say they trust him, you hear people say they know him,” said Antjuan Seawright, a South Carolina-based Democratic strategist. “They feel like he’s the best fit to beat Trump. It all goes back to trust.”


‘THIS LONG HISTORY’
Some black S.C. voters suggested for the good of the party — and in order to defeat Trump — Harris and Biden should put aside differences.

“I don’t think we need to do the infighting and I see it already,” said 62-year-old Brenda Peterson, of Columbia. “And I don’t think it’s a good thing for our platform. That’s what the general public is going to see. They’re going to see that you’re fighting already.”

Yet if Biden’s goal is to win over undecided black voters, such as 31-year-old Jason Belton of Blythewood, he might need to acknowledge the episode.

“It’s going to hurt if you’re not humble and don’t apologize,” Belton said.

Biden could have that opportunity in South Carolina this weekend.

In the meantime, Clyburn doesn’t understand why support for Biden’s candidacy is hard to understand.

“It seems like people do not to want to accept the fact that Joe Biden has this long history, and if you just look at the most recent history, for eight years, he’s been this partner of the first African American president in this United States of America,” Clyburn said. “And that partner said publicly some time ago that of all the decisions he made, the decision to take on Joe Biden as his running mate was the best decision he ever made.”

For some Biden supporters, their decision for the Feb. 29 presidential primary isn’t complicated at all.

Ruth Martin, 78, told The State at Clyburn’s fish fry she’ll vote for Biden because she’s “known” him for years.

“Not known him personally,” she clarified, “but known him for a long time, known his character. I would be happy to go with him.”


FOLLOW MORE OF OUR REPORTING ON

Read more here: https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/election/article231926968.html#storylink=cpy
 

thoughtone

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
source: Business Insider

Joe Biden worried in 1977 that certain de-segregation policies would cause his children to grow up 'in a racial jungle'

5d2ca9d0a17d6c26c15ecce7-1334-667.jpg

Sen. Joe Biden in 1972

  • Former Vice President Joe Biden is facing increased scrutiny over his record on busing and racial issues.

  • Old comments from 1977 resurfaced, quoting Biden as saying that non-"orderly" racial integration policies would cause his children to "grow up in a racial jungle."

  • He then said: "Unless we do something about this, my children are going to grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle with tensions having built so high that it is going to explode at some point."


Former Vice President Joe Biden is facing increased scrutiny over his record on busing and racial issues, and this week old comments resurfaced in which he said, in 1977, that non-"orderly" racial integration policies would cause his children to "grow up in a racial jungle."

The quote was originally discovered by University of Southern California Law School professor and scholar Daria Roithmayr and first reported by The New York Times, which published a lengthy story on Biden's record on busing and school de-segregation on Monday morning.

In the quote, which appears to come from a congressional hearing related to anti-busing legislation, Biden emphasized wanting to "insure we do have orderly integration of society," adding he was "not just talking about education but all of society."

He then said: "Unless we do something about this, my children are going to grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle with tensions having built so high that it is going to explode at some point. We have got to make some move on this."

Read more: Joe Biden apologizes for fondly remembering working with segregationists in Congress

Biden's decades-long opposition to federally mandated busing came back into the spotlight during the first round of Democratic primary debates on June 27, when Sen. Kamala Harris took a targeted shot at him over the issue.

"There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day," Harris said. "That little girl was me. So I will tell you that on this subject, it cannot be an intellectual debate among Democrats."

In the debate, Biden maintained that he didn't oppose voluntary busing programs, only busing ordered by the Department of Education. But new evidence uncovered from that period from The Times revealed Biden to be one of the Senate's most vocal advocates opposing court-ordered busing as well.

Reviewing thousands of documents from the time, The Times reported that Biden preferred expanding affordable housing in suburbs as a tool of integration over busing, and that he teamed up with the famed segregationist Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina on an amendment that would take away the federal government's ability to withdraw funding as a punishment for school districts that did not sufficiently integrate their student bodies.

Biden also took aim at court-ordered busing, bringing forward multiple items of legislation to curb the federal Department of Justice from litigating cases that could result in court-mandated school busing, The Times reported.

In comments reported on in The Times' story, Biden further worried that court-ordered busing would lead to a "race war" and engender resentment among both white and black students.

"You take people who aren't racist, people who are good citizens, who believe in equal education and opportunity, and you stunt their children's intellectual growth by busing them to an inferior school, and you're going to fill them with hatred," he said of a busing plan that would bus white students from the suburbs to urban schools.

He extended his concerns to a hypothetical black student from Wilmington too, wondering, "you send him to Alexis I. DuPont, bus him through Centerville every day, then send him back to the ghetto. How can he be encouraged to love his white brothers?"
 
Top