June 21, 2019

Can we at least admit he misspoke?

in regards to VP Biden's remarks that have aroused at least a little controversy, I understand he wanted to illustrate that it is possible to work with politicians with whom you strogly disagree. It seems to me it would be a stronger yet safer argument to use Republican Senators he has worked with rather than a Democrat who was still fighting for segregation, but it still works with his message. In answer to a legitimate complaint that there are too many controversies around Biden the remarks I am referring to are these:

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.
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.’”

If he is going to continue to tell that story he should work really hard to get all the words right. The word swap that caused this to be an issue is substituting boy for Senator. Biden has been telling this story of his prowess at handling virulent racists for a bit of time now, but it never hit the big time until what I believe is an unacknowledged misstatement. In the past he has said that Senator Eastland never called him Senator always son. That makes a lot more sense and is a lot less controversial than he never called me boy he always called me son. In the first example it is clear Eastland was seriously disrespectful to Biden who was a fellow Senator. In the second example son seems like it could be an endearment in comparison to the alternative. It also causes one to wonder if Biden understands who Eastland would call boy.
At this point Biden and his campaign have not acknowledged the misspeaking and I think that is giving this story more legs than it might have. Nobody has actually called Biden a racist, but that is what him, his campaign, and his supporters have been arguing against. This could have been put to bed quite quickly if the boy-son part would have been handled.