The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #98660 Message #1957305
Posted By: Azizi
04-Feb-07 - 07:15 AM
Thread Name: BS: Is this Racism?
Subject: RE: BS: Is this Racism?
My response: Yes, his remarks were racist. Did {and does} Biden realize that his remarks were {are} racist, I don't know.
Here's some other views on the Biden-Obama is mainstream, clean, articulate comment, and other Bidenisms:
It's not every day that we see a Democratic Senator from the Northeast pandering to Southern Republicans by associating himself sympathetically with the Confederate cause during the Civil War – so isn't it newsworthy when that actually happens? Senator Joe Biden of Delaware has made no secret of his desire to test the presidential waters for the Democratic nomination. As part of that quest, he showed up in South Carolina, an important early primary state, where he took the unusual step of speaking to a mostly Republican audience at the Columbia Rotary Club. According to The State's preeminent political reporter, Lee Bandy, here's part of what Biden said to his strange-bedfellow audience:
"I want to thank you all for allowing me a trip here to speak to only Republicans. It's like my hometown. I just won every district in my state except the one I live in," he quipped.
The crowd howled.
The senator then pounced on a member's announcement that the club would hold its annual Christmas party at the state Department of Archives and History where members could view the original copy of the state's Articles of Secession.
Biden asked, "Where else could I go to a Rotary Club where (for a) Christmas party the highlight is looking at the Articles?"
Biden was on a roll.
Delaware, he noted, was a "slave state that fought beside the North. That's only because we couldn't figure out how to get to the South. There were a couple of states in the way." In all fairness, as Bandy points out, Biden's remarks were clearly made in jest as he warmed the crowd up with a laugh or two before moving into his speech on the Iraq war. But it's not the first time Biden has made similar comments. Appearing on "Fox News Sunday" in August, Biden made the case for his candidacy in the South, according to an AP account at the time, saying, "You don't know my state. … 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 from a Northeast liberal state."
Then again, Republican Senator Trent Lott said he was only joking in 2002 in comments he made at the 100th birthday party for his colleague Strom Thurmond. Lott noted that his home state of Mississippi had voted for Thurmond when he ran for president on a segregationist ticket in 1948. Lott then added, "And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either." Lott was clearly kidding too. But the furor over those remarks led to Lott's resignation as the Republican leader in the Senate (although he was just recently elected to the party's second top spot in the wake of November's elections)...
Biden's contention that hailing from a "slave state" will help his appeal to Southerners is troubling on several levels. Maybe the Lott episode was blown up in the first place. Still, I'm not sure which is more disturbing – Biden's apparent belief that this somehow helps him politically or the audience's reaction. According to Bandy's report, "the crowd loved it." .
February 4, 2007 "Joe Biden's just a barrel of gaffes Not only is he largely unknown outside Congress, but the Delaware senator and presidential hopeful is his own worst enemy.
...In addition to his uncontrollable verbosity, Biden is a gaffe machine. He ran for president 20 years ago but had to abandon his campaign when it was discovered that he had plagiarized speeches from a British politician, substituting in key details to make the story his own.
In his latest effort, Biden wasted no time subverting his already microscopic chances. On the day of his announcement, he mused about Illinois Sen. Obama: "I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy."
In Biden's defense, the quote was widely misunderstood. Having listened to it, it's obvious that Biden was not saying Obama is the first mainstream African American candidate who is also articulate and so on. He was saying he's the first mainstream candidate — meaning ideologically mainstream, unlike Carol Moseley Braun, Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson — and that he's articulate and so on. He wasn't calling Jackson or the others inarticulate. To be sure, this is still a pretty cringe-inducing way for white people to talk about African Americans. There's a famous Chris Rock routine in which he complains about how people describe Colin Powell as "articulate," as if it were a surprise that a secretary of State can speak well.
And, of course, last summer Biden attempted to endear himself to an Indian American supporter by telling him that in Delaware, "you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent." Not only was this an offensive line, it didn't even make any sense: The observation, familiar to anybody who watched a comedian on cable television 15 years ago, is that Indian Americans are the only ones who work in convenience stores, not that they're the only ones who shop there. The man can't even keep his condescending cliches straight.
Biden looks as if he's the product of a laboratory experiment designed to create the world's worst presidential candidate. If the Obama gaffe doesn't knock him out of the race, something else will. I doubt he makes it to Iowa."