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Biden's Evolving Obama Explanation
Below, Jonathan has a good summary of the Biden flap from yesterday. (And he's probably buying up Biden '08 t-shirts on eBay to resell to ironic hipsters at this very moment.) Granted, Joe Biden inserting foot in mouth is hardly news but what struck me as fishy was his evolving explanation of what he meant. On CNN yesterday afternoon he said that his mother had a saying, "clean as a whistle, sharp as a tack," and that using that context, he meant that Obama was astute. But last night on The Daily Show, he said that he meant to say "fresh" (as in fresh ideas) rather than "clean." So which is it, fresh or sharp? If calling Obama "clean" was not a slur, wouldn't his explanation have remained constant? No doubt he had the benefit of several advisers in the meantime, but the changing story seems to signal that Biden is rightly ashamed of his original impulse and is casting around for a better explanation.
I think the media is missing the point of this whole thing, which is almost always the case with "slurs." I have no trouble believing that Biden meant "clean" as "fresh" or "bright." It may have been a poor choice of words, but that is all.
But that isn't the issue. It isn't Biden's language that is suspect, but the idea that he felt he had to "approve" or even comment on the fitness of the party's so-called first African American candidate.
Professor Derek Bell in his book "The permanence of Racism: faces at the bottom of the well" now out of print unfortunately dealt with this double standard. Since Bell was a lawyer he called it a problem of standing. Biden could praise any white candidate and it would be accepted as a compliment. If Hillary is clean, if Kucinich is clean it is positive. The headline if any, Biden praises primary opponent. Bell said he had to be supercautious when recommending black grad students for assistant professorships at Harvard because what he said would be spun in the most negative way.
Imagine if Biden said Hillary ran a clean campaign and it was interpreted by the press as an accusation that Nancy Pelosi, Diane Feinstein and Barbara McKulski were dirty.
How it was really interpreted was exposed by talk host Randi Rhodes on Air America. Biden was saying white people did not fear Obama. The reaction was "We fear all blacks and if you tell us we should not fear Obama then Obama must be an exception" thus your statement is a critism of all other blacks who we should fear more than Obama.
Poor Joe Biden is really not prejudiced and so he can't understand this game. Perhaps he should read Professor Bell's book.
Go see the video clip of Biden commenting that you have to have a slight Indian accent to go into a 7-11 in Delaware and then tell me again why you think this man is not a racist?
He has committed boderline plagiarism throughout his career. Most disturbingly while he had credited Kinnock for language he used while campaigning in 1988 he did present the facts of Kinnock's life as though they were the facts of his own life.
We do not need a Democratic candidate with truthiness problems, not to mention his lame conduct of the Judiciary Committee which gave us Clarence Thomas.