It’s official Joe is in the race for president
- Thread starter easy_b
- Start date
God-Of-War-420
Mr. Pool
4 more years of trump.
You cant make this shit up!! If this is the best they got, were doomed!!
Joe Biden, Mass Incarceration Zealot
BY
BRANKO MARCETIC
For years, Joe Biden was determined to make Democrats the tough-on-crime party. The 1994 Crime Bill and its expansion of mass incarceration was his crowning achievement.
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 IV: Joe Biden, Mass Incarceration Zealot.
Part of the reason Hillary Clinton failed in 2016 was due to the reevaluation of her and Bill Clinton’s atrocious recordon criminal justice, which for decades has devastated the black communities whose votes she and the Democrats desperately want. Well, Joe Biden makes Hillary Clinton look like Michelle Alexander.
Biden’s role in passing the 1994 Clinton crime bill — which became a flashpoint in the 2016 Democratic primary — is a well-known part of his legacy. But focusing exclusively on that particular triumph undercuts all the other hard work Biden did over the course of his career to make sure American prisons were well-stocked with young, often black, men.
One episode in particular sums up Biden’s record. In September 1989, George H. W. Bush delivered a speech outlining his National Drug Control Strategy, in which he called for harsher punishments for drug dealers, nearly $1.5 billion toward drug-related law enforcement, and “more prisons, more jails, more courts, more prosecutors” at every level throughout the country. At the time, the Heritage Foundation gushed that it constituted “the largest increase in resources for law enforcement in the nation’s history,” and it’s now remembered as a key moment in the escalation of the “war on drugs.”
For Biden, however, it was a half-measure.
“Quite frankly, the President’s plan is not tough enough, bold enough, or imaginative enough to meet the crisis at hand,” Biden said in a televised response to Bush’s speech. “In a nutshell, the President’s plan does not include enough police officers to catch the violent thugs, enough prosecutors to convict them, enough judges to sentence them, or enough prison cells to put them away for a long time.”
The episode set the pattern for Biden’s career through the 1990s: every time Republicans put forward a measure that escalated the carceral state beyond sense and reason, Biden would look to one-up it.
Biden was already a tough-on-crime evangelist before this speech, of course. In the 1980s, Biden worked with his “old buddy,” arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond, to pass several bills that fundamentally reshaped the American criminal justice system in the direction of more incarceration.
They, along with Ted Kennedy, had worked on earlier (unsuccessful) proposals that raised maximum penalties, removed a directive requiring the US Sentencing Commission to take into account prison capacity, and created the cabinet-level “drug czar” position. In 1984, they passed the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, which, among other things, abolished parole, imposed a less generous cap on “good time” sentence reductions, and allowed the Sentencing Commission to issue more punitive guidelines.
brag in the Senate that it was under his and Thurmond’s leadership that Congress passed a law sending anyone caught with a rock of cocaine the size of a quarter to jail for a minimum of five years. In the same speech Biden went on to take credit for a legislative change allowing the government to effectively rob anyone caught dealing drugs, through the policy of civil asset forfeiture, and demanded to know why the Bush administration hadn’t sentenced more drug dealers to life in prison or death once Congress had given him that power.
Unlike Biden’s record on civil rights activism, these weren’t empty words: he had indeed voted for both the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 and its 1988 iteration, which together created a regime of harsh mandatory minimums for drug possession, including the “quarter” example Biden would later brag about, as well as the notoriously racist hundred-to-one sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine. The latter also imposed the death penalty for drug-related murders and barred both drug dealers and users from getting government benefits, an amendment Biden specifically voted for.
Not long before Bush’s landmark speech on the drug war, Biden released his own drug strategy report, recommending that the government focus on “the hard-core addict” because they were “responsible for most of the drug-related crime and violence.” “Every hardcore addict must be faced with one of two stark choices: get into treatment or go to jail and get treatment in jail,” he wrote.
When Bush kicked off the 1990s by putting forward a crime bill based on his National Drug Control Strategy, Biden responded with a bill of his own that was nearly identical. There were some differences: Biden’s included a ban on assault rifles, put more money toward treatment, and excised some of Bush’s worst excesses, such as extending the death penalty to “drug kingpins.” It was also $4 billion bigger, with nearly double the aid to state and local enforcement, triple the added FBI agents, and more DEA agents and prosecutors.
At first glance, one could give Biden credit for reining in Bush’s worst impulses. But it quickly emerged that Biden was happy to jettison any reservations about Bush’s measures if it meant having a tough-on-crime law he and the Democrats could take credit for.
“Hang people for jaywalking”
By the time the Senate passed its version of the bill, which featured Bush’s dream of expanding the death penalty to a variety of nonviolent crimes, Biden approvingly called it “the toughest, most comprehensive crime bill in our history.” When some expressed concern about the fact that more than forty crimes would now be eligible for the death sentence, Biden claimed this was “vastly overblown in terms of significance.” No thanks to Biden, this and other items on Bush’s wishlist were ultimately stripped from the bill.
A year later, however, with Bush’s approval ratings getting a bump from the Gulf War, Biden revived these measures, which also included increasing mandatory minimums, limiting the number of appeals for prisoners, and allowing the use of illegally obtained evidence in court as long as police were acting in “good faith” when they broke the law. Biden assured the president that he and the Democrats were “ready right now” to pass all of it if Bush just dropped his opposition to the gun control provisions they wanted to pass in tandem.
When that bill passed the senate, it expanded the death penalty to fifty-one crimes, restricted death row inmates’ ability to appeal their executions, and increased penalties for a variety of offenses, such as dealing drugs at a truck stop. Biden insisted that his bill was “much tougher than the president’s,” with “more penalties for death for more offenses,” and boasted to right-wing critics that “we do everything but hang people for jaywalking.”
A couple amendments added by Republican senator Alfonse D’Amato made the bill even worse — making all gun homicides federal crimes eligible for capital punishment (effectively forcing the death penalty on states that lacked it), and requiring a decade in prison for drug trafficking or any violent crime (including threatening force against property) committed while carrying a gun.
moving several times to end debate on contentious issues and hurry the process along. “I hope the president would maybe take the politics of crime out of the upcoming elections,” he after it passed, warning Republicans that they could no longer claim they were tougher on crime. Biden “had to have more than the president,” one Democratic aide later explained, which helped propel a “bidding war” once the House went on to pass its own version.
It’s not as if there weren’t voices speaking out against what Biden and the rest of the Democrats were wreaking. The NAACP and other groups lobbied against the bill. In a letter addressed to senators just a few days before the vote, three ACLU lawyers called the bill “far worse from a civil liberties perspective than any that has ever been considered by the Senate.” Lawyers and federal judges — including the latter’s official policy-making body — warned it would overwhelm the judicial system and widen its already broad inequality. As the different versions made their way to Bush’s desk, the Washington Post condemned them as “rotten” and an exercise “not so much to combat crime as to convince the public that legislators are tough on criminals.”
What finally killed the bill? Just as Republicans accidentally preventedBill Clinton from cutting Social Security by trying to impeach him, the GOP — outraged that the final version didn’t harshly restrict prisoners’ ability to appeal their executions, and reluctant to give Democrats a “win” going into the 1992 election — blocked it from going further. “I just can’t believe Republicans would kill a death penalty bill,” said Biden.
The GOP’s spite only postponed Biden’s quest to out-tough the GOP on crime, however. In early 1992, Biden continued to accuse Bush of doing too little “to fight this epidemic,” insisting that “unless we embark on a major offensive against drugs, deadly weapons and violent young criminals now, the record carnage will continue to skyrocket.”
Electoral chess
With Clinton in the White House, Biden got his best chance to launch this “major offensive.” He was a key voice pushing Clinton to adopt the tough-on-crime triangulation that would come to tarnish the Clintons’ standing with black voters. According to a memo produced by two advisers and unearthed by political scientist Naomi Murakawa, Biden was privately urging Clinton to “seize control of the issue by upping the ante.” His crime strategy memos at the time demanded “rapid enactment of the Biden/Clinton” crime bill to “maintain crime as a Democratic initiative.”
The result was Clinton’s infamous 1994 crime bill, which Clinton signed with Biden proudly at his side. Biden exulted that the bill had achieved nearly every goal he had called for in his fifth report on US drug strategy, including “more resources to punish drug criminals, cost-effective military-style boot camps for nonviolent drug-addicted offenders, and secure prisons for violent criminals.” He neatly summed up its provisions on the Senate floor:
The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties … The liberal wing of the Democratic Party has 70 enhanced penalties.… The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 100,000 cops. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 125,000 new State prison cells.
“I would like to see the conservative wing of the Democratic Party,” he quipped. When Bill Kristol told the GOP leadership to keep attacking Democrats on the crime bill, Biden responded: “I would like to be running and have someone ‘use the crime bill’ against me.”
This was, after all, the essence of Biden’s project to create the world’s largest prison population: beating the GOP in elections. The countless lives ruined, families broken, and communities devastated by the various “wars” on drugs and crime that Biden was crucial to advancing were all pawns in a game of electoral chess to benefit him and his party.
“I hope to God that Bush attacks us on crime,” Biden said on the eve of the 2000 election. “I think we would eat them alive.” Speaking five years later at the National Sheriffs Association, Biden told the audience that the 1994 bill had been “written by cops and sheriffs,” and that “there is never a time, absent a decrease in population, where you can justify spending less money on crime than you spent the year before.” He later told the organization, in the midst of his run for president in 2007, that “my greatest accomplishment is the 1994 Crime Bill.”
absurd 2002 law that held concert promoters responsible for any drug use at events and treated objects like water bottles and glow sticks as drug paraphernalia. To get the bill passed, Biden re-introduced it numerous times, including once by slipping it into an unrelated bill that created the Amber Alert system. The years that followed saw heavily armed SWAT teams storming raves filled with bewildered, dancing kids — or sometimes DEA agents simpy shutting down events that were neither raves nor involved any drug use.
Biden sings a different tune these days, of course. Most Democrats do, even when their histories are completely at odds with their newfound principles.
But even if Biden has subsequently learned the error of his ways, the rank cynicism and callousness involved in his two-decade-long championing of carceral policies should be more than enough to give anyone pause about his qualities as a leader, let alone a progressive one.
Clinton’s “super-predator” comment was key to hurting her appeal with the Democratic base when running against Trump. You can be sure Biden’s opposition will dredge up his far worse record when the time comes.
Joe Biden, Mass Incarceration Zealot
BY
BRANKO MARCETIC
For years, Joe Biden was determined to make Democrats the tough-on-crime party. The 1994 Crime Bill and its expansion of mass incarceration was his crowning achievement.
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 IV: Joe Biden, Mass Incarceration Zealot.
Part of the reason Hillary Clinton failed in 2016 was due to the reevaluation of her and Bill Clinton’s atrocious recordon criminal justice, which for decades has devastated the black communities whose votes she and the Democrats desperately want. Well, Joe Biden makes Hillary Clinton look like Michelle Alexander.
Biden’s role in passing the 1994 Clinton crime bill — which became a flashpoint in the 2016 Democratic primary — is a well-known part of his legacy. But focusing exclusively on that particular triumph undercuts all the other hard work Biden did over the course of his career to make sure American prisons were well-stocked with young, often black, men.
One episode in particular sums up Biden’s record. In September 1989, George H. W. Bush delivered a speech outlining his National Drug Control Strategy, in which he called for harsher punishments for drug dealers, nearly $1.5 billion toward drug-related law enforcement, and “more prisons, more jails, more courts, more prosecutors” at every level throughout the country. At the time, the Heritage Foundation gushed that it constituted “the largest increase in resources for law enforcement in the nation’s history,” and it’s now remembered as a key moment in the escalation of the “war on drugs.”
For Biden, however, it was a half-measure.
“Quite frankly, the President’s plan is not tough enough, bold enough, or imaginative enough to meet the crisis at hand,” Biden said in a televised response to Bush’s speech. “In a nutshell, the President’s plan does not include enough police officers to catch the violent thugs, enough prosecutors to convict them, enough judges to sentence them, or enough prison cells to put them away for a long time.”
The episode set the pattern for Biden’s career through the 1990s: every time Republicans put forward a measure that escalated the carceral state beyond sense and reason, Biden would look to one-up it.
Biden was already a tough-on-crime evangelist before this speech, of course. In the 1980s, Biden worked with his “old buddy,” arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond, to pass several bills that fundamentally reshaped the American criminal justice system in the direction of more incarceration.
They, along with Ted Kennedy, had worked on earlier (unsuccessful) proposals that raised maximum penalties, removed a directive requiring the US Sentencing Commission to take into account prison capacity, and created the cabinet-level “drug czar” position. In 1984, they passed the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, which, among other things, abolished parole, imposed a less generous cap on “good time” sentence reductions, and allowed the Sentencing Commission to issue more punitive guidelines.
brag in the Senate that it was under his and Thurmond’s leadership that Congress passed a law sending anyone caught with a rock of cocaine the size of a quarter to jail for a minimum of five years. In the same speech Biden went on to take credit for a legislative change allowing the government to effectively rob anyone caught dealing drugs, through the policy of civil asset forfeiture, and demanded to know why the Bush administration hadn’t sentenced more drug dealers to life in prison or death once Congress had given him that power.
Unlike Biden’s record on civil rights activism, these weren’t empty words: he had indeed voted for both the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 and its 1988 iteration, which together created a regime of harsh mandatory minimums for drug possession, including the “quarter” example Biden would later brag about, as well as the notoriously racist hundred-to-one sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine. The latter also imposed the death penalty for drug-related murders and barred both drug dealers and users from getting government benefits, an amendment Biden specifically voted for.
Not long before Bush’s landmark speech on the drug war, Biden released his own drug strategy report, recommending that the government focus on “the hard-core addict” because they were “responsible for most of the drug-related crime and violence.” “Every hardcore addict must be faced with one of two stark choices: get into treatment or go to jail and get treatment in jail,” he wrote.
When Bush kicked off the 1990s by putting forward a crime bill based on his National Drug Control Strategy, Biden responded with a bill of his own that was nearly identical. There were some differences: Biden’s included a ban on assault rifles, put more money toward treatment, and excised some of Bush’s worst excesses, such as extending the death penalty to “drug kingpins.” It was also $4 billion bigger, with nearly double the aid to state and local enforcement, triple the added FBI agents, and more DEA agents and prosecutors.
At first glance, one could give Biden credit for reining in Bush’s worst impulses. But it quickly emerged that Biden was happy to jettison any reservations about Bush’s measures if it meant having a tough-on-crime law he and the Democrats could take credit for.
“Hang people for jaywalking”
By the time the Senate passed its version of the bill, which featured Bush’s dream of expanding the death penalty to a variety of nonviolent crimes, Biden approvingly called it “the toughest, most comprehensive crime bill in our history.” When some expressed concern about the fact that more than forty crimes would now be eligible for the death sentence, Biden claimed this was “vastly overblown in terms of significance.” No thanks to Biden, this and other items on Bush’s wishlist were ultimately stripped from the bill.
A year later, however, with Bush’s approval ratings getting a bump from the Gulf War, Biden revived these measures, which also included increasing mandatory minimums, limiting the number of appeals for prisoners, and allowing the use of illegally obtained evidence in court as long as police were acting in “good faith” when they broke the law. Biden assured the president that he and the Democrats were “ready right now” to pass all of it if Bush just dropped his opposition to the gun control provisions they wanted to pass in tandem.
When that bill passed the senate, it expanded the death penalty to fifty-one crimes, restricted death row inmates’ ability to appeal their executions, and increased penalties for a variety of offenses, such as dealing drugs at a truck stop. Biden insisted that his bill was “much tougher than the president’s,” with “more penalties for death for more offenses,” and boasted to right-wing critics that “we do everything but hang people for jaywalking.”
A couple amendments added by Republican senator Alfonse D’Amato made the bill even worse — making all gun homicides federal crimes eligible for capital punishment (effectively forcing the death penalty on states that lacked it), and requiring a decade in prison for drug trafficking or any violent crime (including threatening force against property) committed while carrying a gun.
moving several times to end debate on contentious issues and hurry the process along. “I hope the president would maybe take the politics of crime out of the upcoming elections,” he after it passed, warning Republicans that they could no longer claim they were tougher on crime. Biden “had to have more than the president,” one Democratic aide later explained, which helped propel a “bidding war” once the House went on to pass its own version.
It’s not as if there weren’t voices speaking out against what Biden and the rest of the Democrats were wreaking. The NAACP and other groups lobbied against the bill. In a letter addressed to senators just a few days before the vote, three ACLU lawyers called the bill “far worse from a civil liberties perspective than any that has ever been considered by the Senate.” Lawyers and federal judges — including the latter’s official policy-making body — warned it would overwhelm the judicial system and widen its already broad inequality. As the different versions made their way to Bush’s desk, the Washington Post condemned them as “rotten” and an exercise “not so much to combat crime as to convince the public that legislators are tough on criminals.”
What finally killed the bill? Just as Republicans accidentally preventedBill Clinton from cutting Social Security by trying to impeach him, the GOP — outraged that the final version didn’t harshly restrict prisoners’ ability to appeal their executions, and reluctant to give Democrats a “win” going into the 1992 election — blocked it from going further. “I just can’t believe Republicans would kill a death penalty bill,” said Biden.
The GOP’s spite only postponed Biden’s quest to out-tough the GOP on crime, however. In early 1992, Biden continued to accuse Bush of doing too little “to fight this epidemic,” insisting that “unless we embark on a major offensive against drugs, deadly weapons and violent young criminals now, the record carnage will continue to skyrocket.”
Electoral chess
With Clinton in the White House, Biden got his best chance to launch this “major offensive.” He was a key voice pushing Clinton to adopt the tough-on-crime triangulation that would come to tarnish the Clintons’ standing with black voters. According to a memo produced by two advisers and unearthed by political scientist Naomi Murakawa, Biden was privately urging Clinton to “seize control of the issue by upping the ante.” His crime strategy memos at the time demanded “rapid enactment of the Biden/Clinton” crime bill to “maintain crime as a Democratic initiative.”
The result was Clinton’s infamous 1994 crime bill, which Clinton signed with Biden proudly at his side. Biden exulted that the bill had achieved nearly every goal he had called for in his fifth report on US drug strategy, including “more resources to punish drug criminals, cost-effective military-style boot camps for nonviolent drug-addicted offenders, and secure prisons for violent criminals.” He neatly summed up its provisions on the Senate floor:
The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties … The liberal wing of the Democratic Party has 70 enhanced penalties.… The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 100,000 cops. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 125,000 new State prison cells.
“I would like to see the conservative wing of the Democratic Party,” he quipped. When Bill Kristol told the GOP leadership to keep attacking Democrats on the crime bill, Biden responded: “I would like to be running and have someone ‘use the crime bill’ against me.”
This was, after all, the essence of Biden’s project to create the world’s largest prison population: beating the GOP in elections. The countless lives ruined, families broken, and communities devastated by the various “wars” on drugs and crime that Biden was crucial to advancing were all pawns in a game of electoral chess to benefit him and his party.
“I hope to God that Bush attacks us on crime,” Biden said on the eve of the 2000 election. “I think we would eat them alive.” Speaking five years later at the National Sheriffs Association, Biden told the audience that the 1994 bill had been “written by cops and sheriffs,” and that “there is never a time, absent a decrease in population, where you can justify spending less money on crime than you spent the year before.” He later told the organization, in the midst of his run for president in 2007, that “my greatest accomplishment is the 1994 Crime Bill.”
absurd 2002 law that held concert promoters responsible for any drug use at events and treated objects like water bottles and glow sticks as drug paraphernalia. To get the bill passed, Biden re-introduced it numerous times, including once by slipping it into an unrelated bill that created the Amber Alert system. The years that followed saw heavily armed SWAT teams storming raves filled with bewildered, dancing kids — or sometimes DEA agents simpy shutting down events that were neither raves nor involved any drug use.
Biden sings a different tune these days, of course. Most Democrats do, even when their histories are completely at odds with their newfound principles.
But even if Biden has subsequently learned the error of his ways, the rank cynicism and callousness involved in his two-decade-long championing of carceral policies should be more than enough to give anyone pause about his qualities as a leader, let alone a progressive one.
Clinton’s “super-predator” comment was key to hurting her appeal with the Democratic base when running against Trump. You can be sure Biden’s opposition will dredge up his far worse record when the time comes.
That guy's a creep. Not gonna' post the pics with kids in them either.
http://theduran.com/secret-service-...n-would-mess-with-every-single-woman-or-teen/
http://theduran.com/secret-service-...n-would-mess-with-every-single-woman-or-teen/
That guy's a creep. Not gonna' post the pics with kids in them either.
"You are a great American."
Will Black Voters Still Love Biden When They Remember Who He Was?
By Eric Levitz@EricLevitz
Say it ain’t Joe. Photo: C-SPAN
Joe Biden once called state-mandated school integration “the most racist concept you can come up with,” and Barack Obama “the first sort of mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean.” He was a staunch opponent of “forced busing” in the 1970s, and leading crusader for mass incarceration throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s. Uncle Joe has described African-American felons as “predators” too sociopathic to rehabilitate — and white supremacist senators as his friends.
And, as of this writing, a plurality of black Democrats want him to be their party’s 2020 nominee.
Whether Biden can retain that support, after voters learn more about his problematic past, could very well determine the outcome of the party’s primary race. To explore that question, let’s pick through the former vice-president’s hefty baggage on racial justice — and then, the case for thinking that Obama’s halo will prove to be brighter than the shadow of Biden’s record is dark.
Biden helped kill the most effective policy for improving black educational attainment that America has ever known.
Joe Biden was for desegregating America’s schools, until his constituents were against it. When the Delaware Democrat launched his first campaign for the Senate in 1972, the Supreme Court had just ruled that the Constitution required policymakers to pursue “the greatest possible degree of actual desegregation” — and that forcing white students to attend schools in black neighborhoods, and vice versa, was a legitimate means of doing so. Being an enlightened liberal, Biden began his candidacy as an advocate for such policies. He accused Republicans of demagoguing the busing issue, and appealing to white voters’ ugliest instincts.
But as his campaign progressed, and Biden discerned that the arc of history was bending toward white backlash, the young candidate bent with it. He became a caricature of a white northern liberal — arguing that forced busing was appropriate for the South (where segregation was the product of racist laws), but unnecessary for the North (where, Biden pretended, it merely reflected the preferences of the white and black communities).
Once in the Senate, Biden continued to triangulate, voting for most, though not all, f the anti-busing amendments that came before him. But for his overwhelmingly white constituents, nothing less than massive resistance to busing would suffice. The New Castle County Neighborhood Schools Association booed Biden off the stage at one event in 1974. One year later, the Delaware senator broke ranks with northern liberals— and joined his virulently racist North Carolina colleague Jesse Helms in voting to kneecap all federal efforts to integrate schools, anywhere in the country. Specifically, Biden voted to bar the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from requiring schools to provide information on the racial makeup of their student bodies — thereby making it nigh-impossible for Uncle Sam to withhold federal funds from school districts that refused to integrate.
LEARN MORE »
The measure was rejected. Nevertheless, Biden persisted. And his cowardly example inspired other self-professed liberals to throw racial justice under the bus. As the historian Jason Sokol writes:
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.”
… Like the Helms gambit, [Biden’s provision] 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.
The NAACP called Biden’s proposal “an anti-black amendment.” The Senate’s sole African-American member, Ed Brooke, called it “the greatest symbolic defeat for civil rights since 1964.” But Biden helped his fellow liberals reconcile themselves to the wrong side of history by recasting integrationists as the real racists.
“The new integration plans being offered are really just quota systems to assure a certain number of blacks, Chicanos, or whatever in each school. That, to me, is the most racist concept you can come up with,” Biden said in a 1975 interview recently unearthed by the Washington Post. “What it says is, ‘In order for your child with curly black hair, brown eyes, and dark skin to be able to learn anything, he needs to sit next to my blond-haired, blue-eyed son.’ That’s racist!”
Biden echoed this in remarks to NPR that same year, saying, “I think the concept of busing … that we are going to integrate people so that they all have the same access and they learn to grow up with one another and all the rest, is a rejection of the whole movement of black pride … a rejection of the entire black awareness concept, where black is beautiful, black culture should be studied; and the cultural awareness of the importance of their own identity, their own individuality.”
As of 2007, Biden believed that this stance had aged well. In a memoir released that year, the soon-to-be presidential candidate derided busing as “a liberal trainwreck.” Education experts disagree. Since some municipalities did integrate their schools through busing (however temporarily), while others did not, scholars have been able to evaluate the policy’s efficacy. In 2011, researchers at Berkeley found that black students who had spent five years in desegregated schools went on to earn (on average) 25 percent more than those who remained in segregated schools (or, in Biden’s phrasing, schools that honored the “black awareness concept”). Other studies have found that racial segregation impairs learning for black students so severely, it outweighs the positive effects associated with higher household income — while integration enhances educational outcomes more profoundly than increasing a school’s safety. Meanwhile, contrary to so many white parents’ fears, integration was not associated with any negative effect on white students’ educational performance.
The rationale for integration is not, as Biden suggested, that black kids need to sit next to blue-eyed ones in order to retain information. Rather, it is that, in a racially stratified society, overwhelmingly African-American schools will (almost inevitably) be sites of concentrated poverty, underinvestment, and relatively low social capital (i.e., places where children from low-income families will be unlikely to form connections with children from higher-income ones). Biden never ceased expressing his concern for black children’s inadequate educational opportunities. But he has done more to perpetuate those inadequacies than to remedy them.
Biden worked tirelessly, over several decades, to make America’s (profoundly racist) criminal-justice system more punitive than any other advanced democracy’s.
It is hard to name an infamously unjust feature of America’s criminal-justice system that Joe Biden didn’t help to bring about. Mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine, civil asset forfeiture, and extensive use of the death penalty — the Delaware senator was involved in establishing them all.
Biden is famous for his lead role in crafting the 1994 crime bill, or, as the senator preferred to call it (as recently as 2015), the “1994 Biden Crime Bill.” Some aspects of that legislation remain popular within the Democratic Party — among them, the Violence Against Women Act, a federal assault-weapons ban, and funds for “community oriented” policing. But in 2019 America — a place where our nation’s violent crime rate is near historic lows, while its incarceration rate hovers around world-historic highs — the bill’s broader legacy is ignominious. The Brennan Center succinctly summarized that legacy on the 20th anniversary of the bill’s passage:
It expanded the death penalty, creating 60 new death penalty offenses under 41 federal capital statutes. It eliminated education funding for incarcerated students, effectively gutting prison education programs. Despite a wealth of research showing education increases post-release employment, reduces recidivism, and improves outcomes for the formerly incarcerated and their families, this change has not been reversed.
And the bill created a wave of change toward harsher state sentencing policy. That change was driven by funding incentives: the bill’s $9.7 billion in federal funding for prison construction went only to states that adopted truth-in-sentencing (TIS) laws, which lead to defendants serving far longer prison terms. Within 5 years, 29 states had TIS laws on the books, 24 more than when the bill was signed. New York State received over $216 million by passing such laws. By 2000 the state had added over 12,000 prison beds and incarcerated 28 percent more people than a decade before.
As a result of these policies — and many others — the United States imprisons a higher proportion of its population today than any other developed country. This is not because Americans commit more crimes — victimization rates in the United States are comparable to those in Western Europe. Rather, it is because we impose harsher sentences on convicts than any other nation deems conscionable.
And for the bulk of his political career, Joe Biden made mandating such sentences one of his defining causes. As a high-ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden didn’t just craft the 1994 crime bill — he also ushered a variety of other draconian measures into law.
As with busing, Biden leaned left on criminal justice early in his career. In 1981, he criticized Republicans for pushing longer sentences for nonviolent offenders when prisons were already overcrowded. But, as with busing, Biden was one of the first liberals to discern the rightward shift in public opinion on criminal justice — and quite possibly, the most enthusiastic convert to the gospel of law-and-order liberalism. During the 1980s, Biden helped pass laws reinstating the federal death penalty, abolishing federal parole, increasing penalties for marijuana possession, expanding the use of civil asset forfeiture, and establishing a 100-to-1 sentencing disparity for possession of crack cocaine (used disproportionately by poor nonwhite people) and powder cocaine (used disproportionately by rich white people).
Biden’s support for these measures wasn’t a wholly defensive responsive to public outrage over violent crime. Rather, it was a proactive effort to capitalize on the electorate’s increasingly draconian mood.
In 1989, George H. W. Bush gave a national address outlining his plans to ramp up the war on drugs. Biden delivered the Democratic response, and savaged the Republican’s plan to drastically increase incarceration for drug crimes — from the right.
“Quite frankly, the president’s plan is not tough enough, bold enough, or imaginative enough to meet the crisis at hand,” Biden told the American people. “In a nutshell, the president’s plan does not include enough police officers to catch the violent thugs, enough prosecutors to convict them, enough judges to sentence them, or enough prison cells to put them away for a long time.”
CNN’s KFile, Biden raised awareness of the (mythical) threat posed by super-predators — a rising generation of inner city children so comprehensively failed by their parents and society, they had developed into incurable sociopaths whom the state could quarantine but never rehabilitate.
There is a “cadre of young people, tens of thousands of them, born out of wedlock, without parents, without supervision, without any structure, without any conscience developing because they literally … because they literally have not been socialized, they literally have not had an opportunity,” Biden explained. He then he urged his colleagues to support aid to such youths now, or else they would “become the predators 15 years from now.”
andrew kaczynski
✔@KFILE
· Mar 7, 2019
Replying to @KFILE
Story with the longer video here. (highlights to comehttps://www.cnn.com/2019/03/07/politics/biden-1993-speech-predators/index.html …
Biden in 1993 speech pushing crime bill warned of 'predators on our streets' who were 'beyond the...
Joe Biden in a 1993 speech warned of "predators on our streets" who were "beyond the pale" and said they must be cordoned off from the rest of society because the justice system did not know how to...
cnn.com
andrew kaczynski
✔@KFILE
In the same speech, Biden warned of dealing with the "cadre of young" people without "conscious developing" that would become "predators" that were "beyond the pale" who would have be taken out of society. https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/07/politics/biden-1993-speech-predators/index.html … pic.twitter.com/NC0mJSenrn
599
10:35 AM - Mar 7, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
411 people are talking about this
As for the already existing predators, “they are beyond the pale many of those people, beyond the pale,” Biden said. “We have no choice but to take them out of society … rehabilitation, when it occurs, we don’t understand it and notice it, and even when we notice it and we know it occurs, we don’t know why. So you cannot make rehabilitation a condition for release.”
The super-predator proved to be a myth. But the specter of inner cities teeming with irredeemable monsters and abandoned children helped rationalize both mass incarceration, and its racially inequitable character.
Uncle Joe says the darndest (and/or most racially insensitive) things.
Beyond his role in perpetuating systemic racism (through his opposition to school integration, and support for mass incarceration), Biden has long displayed a penchant for political incorrectness. His suggestion that Barack Obama was the first clean and articulate African-American to run for president is probably the most infamous of his gaffes. But the former vice-president also told a crowd of black voters in 2012 that Mitt Romney would “put you all back in chains,” and has a habit of badly impersonating Indian convenience-store clerks and call-center employees. But Biden’s most troubling “racially tinged” remarks might be those he does not regard as such. Specifically, the former vice-president has long boasted of his warm — and often legislatively productive — relationships with white supremacist southern senators.
“I’ve been around so long, I worked with James Eastland,” Biden said at a rally for Democratic Senate candidate Doug Jones in the fall of 2017. “Even in the days when I got there, the Democratic Party still had seven or eight old-fashioned Democratic segregationists. You’d get up and you’d argue like the devil with them. Then you’d go down and have lunch or dinner together. The political system worked. We were divided on issues, but the political system worked.”
Biden’s sentiments read like a satire of nostalgia for bipartisan comity, laying bare the amorality and elitism inherent to celebrating collegiality for its own sake. Needless to say, a political system in which a man who believed that his dark-skinned constituents belonged to an “inferior race” — and must be quarantined to their own institutions to prevent the “mongrelization” of the white race — was not one that “worked” for said constituents.
And Eastland isn’t the only white supremacist Biden can’t help expressing grudging admiration for. The Democratic front-runner also warmly eulogized Strom Thurmond at his funeral, and his insistence on fondly recalling his relationship with Jesse Helms “grates on even members of his own team, who have told him as much,” according to a recent report from the New York Times.
Biden’s faith in such senators’ entitlement to dignity, and capacity for redemption, stands in marked contrast to his erstwhile views on rehabilitating “predators” and “violent thugs.”
Why Biden might well win the Democratic nomination with strong African-American support anyway.
Late last month, Emerson College polled South Carolina Democrats on their preferences for the party’s 2020 nominee. Among African-American Democrats, there was little competition: Joe Biden boasted 43 percent of the demographic’s support — his closest competitor, Bernie Sanders, claimed a meager 15 percent. Kamala Harris’s support sat at 9. Emerson’s findings are consistent with broader national surveys of the 2020 primary, which consistently paint Biden as the front-runner — thanks, in no small part, to his popularity among black voters.
How do we reconcile Biden’s considerable complicity in racial injustice with his enviable popularity among his party’s African-American base?
One answer is the Biden’s apparent strength with such voters is illusory. The (likely) candidate is coasting off of his name recognition and association with Barack Obama. Once the primary campaign puts the history summarized above under the spotlight — along with Biden’s myriad other heresies against progressivism, including his support for bankruptcy reforms that hurt low-income consumers, his shoddy treatment of Anita Hill, and his advocacy for the Iraq War — black voters will see through his “malarkey.” This is quite plausible.
But a recent focus group conducted by Democratic consultant Danny Barefoot of Anvil Strategies offers some limited evidence that it is nonetheless mistaken.
Danny Barefoot@dannybarefoot
https://twitter.com/dannybarefoot/status/1102988677557510144
So, I’m working with a client today to conduct a focus group of black women who are likely to vote in the South Carolina Democratic Presidential primary. I have the client’s permission to tweet out anecdotes and observations, but they’d prefer not to be named.
1,141
12:46 PM - Mar 5, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
459 people are talking about this
Danny Barefoot@dannybarefoot
· Mar 5, 2019
Replying to @dannybarefoot
(Reminds self that Twitter is a bubble)
Danny Barefoot@dannybarefoot
Now we’re on to Biden. One woman says it’s the closest we can get to a 3rd term for Obama w/o electing Michelle. Lots of chuckles but also lots of heads nodding in agreement. Another says she would vote for him today but isn’t sure if he’s too “old” or “sloppy” to take on Trump.
447
1:09 PM - Mar 5, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
62 people are talking about this
Danny Barefoot@dannybarefoot
· Mar 5, 2019
Replying to @dannybarefoot
Now we’re on to Biden. One woman says it’s the closest we can get to a 3rd term for Obama w/o electing Michelle. Lots of chuckles but also lots of heads nodding in agreement. Another says she would vote for him today but isn’t sure if he’s too “old” or “sloppy” to take on Trump.
Danny Barefoot@dannybarefoot
Now we’ll move on to some negative message testing against Biden.
165
1:13 PM - Mar 5, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
15 people are talking about this
Danny Barefoot@dannybarefoot
· Mar 5, 2019
Replying to @dannybarefoot
Now we’ll move on to some negative message testing against Biden.
Danny Barefoot@dannybarefoot
Yeah…most of these hits just aren’t landing. In response to a short description of Biden’s opposition to integration efforts one woman asks if we’re honestly asking her to believe he is a segregationist. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/joe-biden-integration-school-busing-120968 …
354
1:22 PM - Mar 5, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
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.
politico.com
40 people are talking about this
Another explanation is that black voters find Biden’s heresies against racial liberalism forgivable. The man might have played a leading role in opposing busing, but he was ultimately responding to mobilized, majoritarian opposition that was all but certain to prevail no matter what position he chose to take. As for mass incarceration, the crack epidemic was truly a scourge, and even many African-American community leaders embraced the logic of “tough on crime” in its wake. It’s also conceivable that some portion of black Democratic primary voters agree, to this day, with Biden’s Clinton-era views on criminal justice. A significant minority of African-American Democrats identify as conservative, and indicate a broadly positive view of the police.
As is the case in so many American communities, the most prominent black activist groups and public intellectuals tend to be both more ideological — and more ideologically left wing — than the median black voter. The average American votes less on the basis of ideology than identity. Black Democrats identify strongly with Barack Obama, and Obama spent eight years vouching for Biden’s fitness for high office. That might count for more than the misgivings of elite progressive commentators like myself.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019...ustice-democratic-primary-2020-explained.html
By Eric Levitz@EricLevitz
Say it ain’t Joe. Photo: C-SPAN
Joe Biden once called state-mandated school integration “the most racist concept you can come up with,” and Barack Obama “the first sort of mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean.” He was a staunch opponent of “forced busing” in the 1970s, and leading crusader for mass incarceration throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s. Uncle Joe has described African-American felons as “predators” too sociopathic to rehabilitate — and white supremacist senators as his friends.
And, as of this writing, a plurality of black Democrats want him to be their party’s 2020 nominee.
Whether Biden can retain that support, after voters learn more about his problematic past, could very well determine the outcome of the party’s primary race. To explore that question, let’s pick through the former vice-president’s hefty baggage on racial justice — and then, the case for thinking that Obama’s halo will prove to be brighter than the shadow of Biden’s record is dark.
Biden helped kill the most effective policy for improving black educational attainment that America has ever known.
Joe Biden was for desegregating America’s schools, until his constituents were against it. When the Delaware Democrat launched his first campaign for the Senate in 1972, the Supreme Court had just ruled that the Constitution required policymakers to pursue “the greatest possible degree of actual desegregation” — and that forcing white students to attend schools in black neighborhoods, and vice versa, was a legitimate means of doing so. Being an enlightened liberal, Biden began his candidacy as an advocate for such policies. He accused Republicans of demagoguing the busing issue, and appealing to white voters’ ugliest instincts.
But as his campaign progressed, and Biden discerned that the arc of history was bending toward white backlash, the young candidate bent with it. He became a caricature of a white northern liberal — arguing that forced busing was appropriate for the South (where segregation was the product of racist laws), but unnecessary for the North (where, Biden pretended, it merely reflected the preferences of the white and black communities).
Once in the Senate, Biden continued to triangulate, voting for most, though not all, f the anti-busing amendments that came before him. But for his overwhelmingly white constituents, nothing less than massive resistance to busing would suffice. The New Castle County Neighborhood Schools Association booed Biden off the stage at one event in 1974. One year later, the Delaware senator broke ranks with northern liberals— and joined his virulently racist North Carolina colleague Jesse Helms in voting to kneecap all federal efforts to integrate schools, anywhere in the country. Specifically, Biden voted to bar the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from requiring schools to provide information on the racial makeup of their student bodies — thereby making it nigh-impossible for Uncle Sam to withhold federal funds from school districts that refused to integrate.
LEARN MORE »
The measure was rejected. Nevertheless, Biden persisted. And his cowardly example inspired other self-professed liberals to throw racial justice under the bus. As the historian Jason Sokol writes:
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.”
… Like the Helms gambit, [Biden’s provision] 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.
The NAACP called Biden’s proposal “an anti-black amendment.” The Senate’s sole African-American member, Ed Brooke, called it “the greatest symbolic defeat for civil rights since 1964.” But Biden helped his fellow liberals reconcile themselves to the wrong side of history by recasting integrationists as the real racists.
“The new integration plans being offered are really just quota systems to assure a certain number of blacks, Chicanos, or whatever in each school. That, to me, is the most racist concept you can come up with,” Biden said in a 1975 interview recently unearthed by the Washington Post. “What it says is, ‘In order for your child with curly black hair, brown eyes, and dark skin to be able to learn anything, he needs to sit next to my blond-haired, blue-eyed son.’ That’s racist!”
Biden echoed this in remarks to NPR that same year, saying, “I think the concept of busing … that we are going to integrate people so that they all have the same access and they learn to grow up with one another and all the rest, is a rejection of the whole movement of black pride … a rejection of the entire black awareness concept, where black is beautiful, black culture should be studied; and the cultural awareness of the importance of their own identity, their own individuality.”
As of 2007, Biden believed that this stance had aged well. In a memoir released that year, the soon-to-be presidential candidate derided busing as “a liberal trainwreck.” Education experts disagree. Since some municipalities did integrate their schools through busing (however temporarily), while others did not, scholars have been able to evaluate the policy’s efficacy. In 2011, researchers at Berkeley found that black students who had spent five years in desegregated schools went on to earn (on average) 25 percent more than those who remained in segregated schools (or, in Biden’s phrasing, schools that honored the “black awareness concept”). Other studies have found that racial segregation impairs learning for black students so severely, it outweighs the positive effects associated with higher household income — while integration enhances educational outcomes more profoundly than increasing a school’s safety. Meanwhile, contrary to so many white parents’ fears, integration was not associated with any negative effect on white students’ educational performance.
The rationale for integration is not, as Biden suggested, that black kids need to sit next to blue-eyed ones in order to retain information. Rather, it is that, in a racially stratified society, overwhelmingly African-American schools will (almost inevitably) be sites of concentrated poverty, underinvestment, and relatively low social capital (i.e., places where children from low-income families will be unlikely to form connections with children from higher-income ones). Biden never ceased expressing his concern for black children’s inadequate educational opportunities. But he has done more to perpetuate those inadequacies than to remedy them.
Biden worked tirelessly, over several decades, to make America’s (profoundly racist) criminal-justice system more punitive than any other advanced democracy’s.
It is hard to name an infamously unjust feature of America’s criminal-justice system that Joe Biden didn’t help to bring about. Mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine, civil asset forfeiture, and extensive use of the death penalty — the Delaware senator was involved in establishing them all.
Biden is famous for his lead role in crafting the 1994 crime bill, or, as the senator preferred to call it (as recently as 2015), the “1994 Biden Crime Bill.” Some aspects of that legislation remain popular within the Democratic Party — among them, the Violence Against Women Act, a federal assault-weapons ban, and funds for “community oriented” policing. But in 2019 America — a place where our nation’s violent crime rate is near historic lows, while its incarceration rate hovers around world-historic highs — the bill’s broader legacy is ignominious. The Brennan Center succinctly summarized that legacy on the 20th anniversary of the bill’s passage:
It expanded the death penalty, creating 60 new death penalty offenses under 41 federal capital statutes. It eliminated education funding for incarcerated students, effectively gutting prison education programs. Despite a wealth of research showing education increases post-release employment, reduces recidivism, and improves outcomes for the formerly incarcerated and their families, this change has not been reversed.
And the bill created a wave of change toward harsher state sentencing policy. That change was driven by funding incentives: the bill’s $9.7 billion in federal funding for prison construction went only to states that adopted truth-in-sentencing (TIS) laws, which lead to defendants serving far longer prison terms. Within 5 years, 29 states had TIS laws on the books, 24 more than when the bill was signed. New York State received over $216 million by passing such laws. By 2000 the state had added over 12,000 prison beds and incarcerated 28 percent more people than a decade before.
As a result of these policies — and many others — the United States imprisons a higher proportion of its population today than any other developed country. This is not because Americans commit more crimes — victimization rates in the United States are comparable to those in Western Europe. Rather, it is because we impose harsher sentences on convicts than any other nation deems conscionable.
And for the bulk of his political career, Joe Biden made mandating such sentences one of his defining causes. As a high-ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden didn’t just craft the 1994 crime bill — he also ushered a variety of other draconian measures into law.
As with busing, Biden leaned left on criminal justice early in his career. In 1981, he criticized Republicans for pushing longer sentences for nonviolent offenders when prisons were already overcrowded. But, as with busing, Biden was one of the first liberals to discern the rightward shift in public opinion on criminal justice — and quite possibly, the most enthusiastic convert to the gospel of law-and-order liberalism. During the 1980s, Biden helped pass laws reinstating the federal death penalty, abolishing federal parole, increasing penalties for marijuana possession, expanding the use of civil asset forfeiture, and establishing a 100-to-1 sentencing disparity for possession of crack cocaine (used disproportionately by poor nonwhite people) and powder cocaine (used disproportionately by rich white people).
Biden’s support for these measures wasn’t a wholly defensive responsive to public outrage over violent crime. Rather, it was a proactive effort to capitalize on the electorate’s increasingly draconian mood.
In 1989, George H. W. Bush gave a national address outlining his plans to ramp up the war on drugs. Biden delivered the Democratic response, and savaged the Republican’s plan to drastically increase incarceration for drug crimes — from the right.
“Quite frankly, the president’s plan is not tough enough, bold enough, or imaginative enough to meet the crisis at hand,” Biden told the American people. “In a nutshell, the president’s plan does not include enough police officers to catch the violent thugs, enough prosecutors to convict them, enough judges to sentence them, or enough prison cells to put them away for a long time.”
CNN’s KFile, Biden raised awareness of the (mythical) threat posed by super-predators — a rising generation of inner city children so comprehensively failed by their parents and society, they had developed into incurable sociopaths whom the state could quarantine but never rehabilitate.
There is a “cadre of young people, tens of thousands of them, born out of wedlock, without parents, without supervision, without any structure, without any conscience developing because they literally … because they literally have not been socialized, they literally have not had an opportunity,” Biden explained. He then he urged his colleagues to support aid to such youths now, or else they would “become the predators 15 years from now.”
andrew kaczynski
✔@KFILE
· Mar 7, 2019
Replying to @KFILE
Story with the longer video here. (highlights to comehttps://www.cnn.com/2019/03/07/politics/biden-1993-speech-predators/index.html …
Biden in 1993 speech pushing crime bill warned of 'predators on our streets' who were 'beyond the...
Joe Biden in a 1993 speech warned of "predators on our streets" who were "beyond the pale" and said they must be cordoned off from the rest of society because the justice system did not know how to...
cnn.com
andrew kaczynski
✔@KFILE
In the same speech, Biden warned of dealing with the "cadre of young" people without "conscious developing" that would become "predators" that were "beyond the pale" who would have be taken out of society. https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/07/politics/biden-1993-speech-predators/index.html … pic.twitter.com/NC0mJSenrn
599
10:35 AM - Mar 7, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
411 people are talking about this
As for the already existing predators, “they are beyond the pale many of those people, beyond the pale,” Biden said. “We have no choice but to take them out of society … rehabilitation, when it occurs, we don’t understand it and notice it, and even when we notice it and we know it occurs, we don’t know why. So you cannot make rehabilitation a condition for release.”
The super-predator proved to be a myth. But the specter of inner cities teeming with irredeemable monsters and abandoned children helped rationalize both mass incarceration, and its racially inequitable character.
Uncle Joe says the darndest (and/or most racially insensitive) things.
Beyond his role in perpetuating systemic racism (through his opposition to school integration, and support for mass incarceration), Biden has long displayed a penchant for political incorrectness. His suggestion that Barack Obama was the first clean and articulate African-American to run for president is probably the most infamous of his gaffes. But the former vice-president also told a crowd of black voters in 2012 that Mitt Romney would “put you all back in chains,” and has a habit of badly impersonating Indian convenience-store clerks and call-center employees. But Biden’s most troubling “racially tinged” remarks might be those he does not regard as such. Specifically, the former vice-president has long boasted of his warm — and often legislatively productive — relationships with white supremacist southern senators.
“I’ve been around so long, I worked with James Eastland,” Biden said at a rally for Democratic Senate candidate Doug Jones in the fall of 2017. “Even in the days when I got there, the Democratic Party still had seven or eight old-fashioned Democratic segregationists. You’d get up and you’d argue like the devil with them. Then you’d go down and have lunch or dinner together. The political system worked. We were divided on issues, but the political system worked.”
Biden’s sentiments read like a satire of nostalgia for bipartisan comity, laying bare the amorality and elitism inherent to celebrating collegiality for its own sake. Needless to say, a political system in which a man who believed that his dark-skinned constituents belonged to an “inferior race” — and must be quarantined to their own institutions to prevent the “mongrelization” of the white race — was not one that “worked” for said constituents.
And Eastland isn’t the only white supremacist Biden can’t help expressing grudging admiration for. The Democratic front-runner also warmly eulogized Strom Thurmond at his funeral, and his insistence on fondly recalling his relationship with Jesse Helms “grates on even members of his own team, who have told him as much,” according to a recent report from the New York Times.
Biden’s faith in such senators’ entitlement to dignity, and capacity for redemption, stands in marked contrast to his erstwhile views on rehabilitating “predators” and “violent thugs.”
Why Biden might well win the Democratic nomination with strong African-American support anyway.
Late last month, Emerson College polled South Carolina Democrats on their preferences for the party’s 2020 nominee. Among African-American Democrats, there was little competition: Joe Biden boasted 43 percent of the demographic’s support — his closest competitor, Bernie Sanders, claimed a meager 15 percent. Kamala Harris’s support sat at 9. Emerson’s findings are consistent with broader national surveys of the 2020 primary, which consistently paint Biden as the front-runner — thanks, in no small part, to his popularity among black voters.
How do we reconcile Biden’s considerable complicity in racial injustice with his enviable popularity among his party’s African-American base?
One answer is the Biden’s apparent strength with such voters is illusory. The (likely) candidate is coasting off of his name recognition and association with Barack Obama. Once the primary campaign puts the history summarized above under the spotlight — along with Biden’s myriad other heresies against progressivism, including his support for bankruptcy reforms that hurt low-income consumers, his shoddy treatment of Anita Hill, and his advocacy for the Iraq War — black voters will see through his “malarkey.” This is quite plausible.
But a recent focus group conducted by Democratic consultant Danny Barefoot of Anvil Strategies offers some limited evidence that it is nonetheless mistaken.
Danny Barefoot@dannybarefoot
https://twitter.com/dannybarefoot/status/1102988677557510144
So, I’m working with a client today to conduct a focus group of black women who are likely to vote in the South Carolina Democratic Presidential primary. I have the client’s permission to tweet out anecdotes and observations, but they’d prefer not to be named.
1,141
12:46 PM - Mar 5, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
459 people are talking about this
Danny Barefoot@dannybarefoot
· Mar 5, 2019
Replying to @dannybarefoot
(Reminds self that Twitter is a bubble)
Danny Barefoot@dannybarefoot
Now we’re on to Biden. One woman says it’s the closest we can get to a 3rd term for Obama w/o electing Michelle. Lots of chuckles but also lots of heads nodding in agreement. Another says she would vote for him today but isn’t sure if he’s too “old” or “sloppy” to take on Trump.
447
1:09 PM - Mar 5, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
62 people are talking about this
Danny Barefoot@dannybarefoot
· Mar 5, 2019
Replying to @dannybarefoot
Now we’re on to Biden. One woman says it’s the closest we can get to a 3rd term for Obama w/o electing Michelle. Lots of chuckles but also lots of heads nodding in agreement. Another says she would vote for him today but isn’t sure if he’s too “old” or “sloppy” to take on Trump.
Danny Barefoot@dannybarefoot
Now we’ll move on to some negative message testing against Biden.
165
1:13 PM - Mar 5, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
15 people are talking about this
Danny Barefoot@dannybarefoot
· Mar 5, 2019
Replying to @dannybarefoot
Now we’ll move on to some negative message testing against Biden.
Danny Barefoot@dannybarefoot
Yeah…most of these hits just aren’t landing. In response to a short description of Biden’s opposition to integration efforts one woman asks if we’re honestly asking her to believe he is a segregationist. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/joe-biden-integration-school-busing-120968 …
354
1:22 PM - Mar 5, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
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.
politico.com
40 people are talking about this
Another explanation is that black voters find Biden’s heresies against racial liberalism forgivable. The man might have played a leading role in opposing busing, but he was ultimately responding to mobilized, majoritarian opposition that was all but certain to prevail no matter what position he chose to take. As for mass incarceration, the crack epidemic was truly a scourge, and even many African-American community leaders embraced the logic of “tough on crime” in its wake. It’s also conceivable that some portion of black Democratic primary voters agree, to this day, with Biden’s Clinton-era views on criminal justice. A significant minority of African-American Democrats identify as conservative, and indicate a broadly positive view of the police.
As is the case in so many American communities, the most prominent black activist groups and public intellectuals tend to be both more ideological — and more ideologically left wing — than the median black voter. The average American votes less on the basis of ideology than identity. Black Democrats identify strongly with Barack Obama, and Obama spent eight years vouching for Biden’s fitness for high office. That might count for more than the misgivings of elite progressive commentators like myself.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019...ustice-democratic-primary-2020-explained.html
You guys can talk all the shit you want but he is the only one that even has a remote chance at beating trump.
If not joe then who? Sanders? Kamala Harris, or the homo Mayor? Lol
You better hope joe gets the nomination or it’s 4 more years of trump
If not joe then who? Sanders? Kamala Harris, or the homo Mayor? Lol
You better hope joe gets the nomination or it’s 4 more years of trump
We are fucked.
We been fucked since 2016.
These old mofos need to go sit on the porch. Late 70s is too old to be running shit.
Last thing we need is another cat in the White House with dementia.
Last thing we need is another cat in the White House with dementia.
They know that shit already. That's what they want.
Right on, write on, bruh!!! Will this madness, ever end??
You guys can talk all the shit you want but he is the only one that even has a remote chance at beating trump.
If not joe then who? Sanders? Kamala Harris, or the homo Mayor? Lol
You better hope joe gets the nomination or it’s 4 more years of trump
Actually, we've been fucked since billy clinton sold out the democrats in the mid 90's and jumped deep in bed with the corporations!! But, nobody wants to address that and turn a blind eye on it!!
We've been fucked, people just dont wanna admit it!!
Kinda early to be starting the lesser of two evils shit and we might as well just go with the flow and follow the establishment selection cause it the only chance we have.
Some of you mofokrs real quick to forget the track record of these people. You did it will Hillary and now you doing it with Biden.
Some of you mofokrs real quick to forget the track record of these people. You did it will Hillary and now you doing it with Biden.
Welp, he’ll be the next race’s Hillary. Watch the DNC push him harder than anyone else.
Fuck Joe
Call the homo mayor by his name Booty judgeYou guys can talk all the shit you want but he is the only one that even has a remote chance at beating trump.
If not joe then who? Sanders? Kamala Harris, or the homo Mayor? Lol
You better hope joe gets the nomination or it’s 4 more years of trump
You guys can talk all the shit you want but he is the only one that even has a remote chance at beating trump.
If not joe then who? Sanders? Kamala Harris, or the homo Mayor? Lol
You better hope joe gets the nomination or it’s 4 more years of trump
Every Democratic candidate, black or white, has been dragged when they announce their candidacy or interest in running.
All while Trump is appointing judges at a ridiculous pace (including two Supreme Court picks with Ginsberg barely hanging on) which will have dire consequences (particularly for us) for years.
This in addition to his open blatant racism which has emboldened racists in a way we haven't seen for some time, implemented a tax plan that is already hurting the majority of the country and may get worse, etc.
I say this to simply say I'm all for accountability and not blindly following Democrats but destroying every potential candidate before they even face Trump is foolish.
All of these candidates are and will be flawed. But no matter how bad they are none will be worse for us than Trump and the Republicans.
For our own sake no matter who out of these candidates runs vs. Trump we need to all vote for that person as if it's Obama in 2008.
Once Trump is removed I'm all for going in and holding the Democrats accountable.
Exactly this dude is a former VP he had more insight and knowledge to trump and all of his bullshit leading up to the 2016 general election
Niggas really in here talking that 4 more years of trump shit
I wonder why kats always forget looking at their track record??
And she would have been a much better president.
I'm not a fan of Biden, the Clinton's, or any politician for that matter.
However deciding to suddenly start holding these individuals accountable after all these years when the stakes are so high to me is ill-advised.
when would you hold them accountable before they run ?
to anoint them the victor and the only salvation before the damn primary is what is ill-advised.
to allow the DNC and the DCCC to convince you they know whats best is ignorant.
Biden is being held in high regard simply because he was Obamas VP ?
And what makes you think Hillary would be a better president ?she was shit as a senator or SoS.. Is it that we can only hope that nobody would be worse than Chump ?
Well that was said about Bush jr and we see now that was wrong.
point is make a decision based on who is best and if that person doesn't end up on the ballot THEN vote for ABT........but damn sure don't crown him already
If Biden was a good enough Vice President for my President (Obama) then he's a good choice for me as our next President too.
Any politician whose been in the game for 50 years is going to have policy that will haunt them. People change and evolve with the times.
I like Warren but will vote for whomever is the Dem nominee.
Any politician whose been in the game for 50 years is going to have policy that will haunt them. People change and evolve with the times.
I like Warren but will vote for whomever is the Dem nominee.
She said she's not interested
We start holding individuals accountable and more importantly vetting candidates in the years prior to the traditional election cycle.
You don't wait a year and a half from an election and start making demands.
If we want to avoid these flawed, less than ideal candidates we need to be more engaged and diligent in pushing our agenda and candidates who will work on our behalf.
Voters (Republican, Democrat, Independent, etc.) take no action and have a tendency to be absent in years where the Presidency isn't being determined or if there isn't an ideal candidate (which I think a lot of us are guilty of at times.)
Its almost like that family member who never contributes in any way to the family picnic but complains about the location, food, etc.
This all day.
I agree.......and I think Biden was held accountable prior to being with Obama but that didn't stop him from winning in the Senate because of he district he runs in.
but the truth is there are low IQ voters period.
And just like 2016 and 2018 the key for 2020 is holding the house and taking the Senate.......short of that of that no changes will be made but further damage may be halted
Yeah that is the problem with the democrats and the left today. They want to act holy. Newsflash! nobody is perfect. Every Candidate is going to have a flaw.
Look at the republicans. A lot of republicans deep down hate trump! but one thing I respect about the GOP is that they have there eyes on the price.
Trump is a asshole but they are getting there lifetime judges. There getting there nice tax cuts, etc..
Joe Biden is not perfect but he is the only man that can take down Trump.
Look at the republicans. A lot of republicans deep down hate trump! but one thing I respect about the GOP is that they have there eyes on the price.
Trump is a asshole but they are getting there lifetime judges. There getting there nice tax cuts, etc..
Joe Biden is not perfect but he is the only man that can take down Trump.