HOW IT STARTED:
This is NEWS AND NOTES. I’m Ed Gordon. On today’s Roundtable, Senator Biden’s slave state – will it help him if he runs in ’08? And Kofi Annan booed in Beirut.
Joining us from out New York bureau is Michael Meyers, executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition, and E.R. Shipp, distinguished professor of journalism at Hofstra University School of Communication. Also with us, Callie Crossley, social and cultural commentator on the television show Beat the Press, which is seen in the Boston area. She joins us as she gets that last-minute vacation in from Martha’s Vineyard. We appreciate you interrupting that, Callie.
E.R., let me start with you. The idea of – and we wanted to take a broad-based look at Dems as they move to ’08. A lot of talk about Hillary Clinton. But as we see others either quietly – like John Edwards – readying themselves, if you believe that he’s going to run, or others laying groundwork. John Kerry has suggested that he’s ready to go, and now has made claims which he backed away from immediately that perhaps Ohio didn’t do him right by virtue of voter intimidation.
We also hear now from Senator Joe Biden of Delaware when he talks about whether or not a northern liberal can be something that’s palatable to Southern voters. He said this on Fox News.
“You don’t know my state. My state was a slave state, my state is a border state, my state has the either largest black population in the country. My state is anything from a Northeast liberal state. We see Joe Biden embracing the fact that it was a slave state.”
Professor E.R. SHIPP (Professor of Journalism, Hofstra University): Yes. This -between Kerry and Biden, it seems like this is an episode of the Democrats version of Desperate Housewives; we just call it desperate politicians. With Kerry, he should’ve raised the issue back in 2004. And the particulars of the vote count then have been challenged and so far upheld. But what he’s doing now is pandering to try to raise money for the Democratic candidate in the race in Ohio.
But Biden sounds like he’s – he’s an interesting character – but it sounds like he’s basically saying, I had more slaves than you did. Delaware was just a slave state. I mean it was like – it’s ridiculous on his face. But he’s been known to have difficulties with expressing himself verbally.
Remember way back when when he gave this very heartfelt off-the-cuff speech about labor and all of that, and it was really plagiarizing a speech that had been given by a British politician earlier. So Biden – and he also was found guilty of plagiarizing in law school. Got an F in a class that he had to retake.
So he’s had difficulty with words, so who knows what he really wanted to say, but it didn’t come across well.
—“Roundtable: Slavery in Delaware; Heckling Annan,” NPR, August 30th, 2006.
How it’s going: Perhaps NPR is tacitly answering the question of what Biden wanted to say back then, particularly based on the administration’s Nazi and CCP-inspired “Dark Brandon” meme, which featured into last week’s disastrous optics: Biden’s so-white historians may miss crucial points on saving democracy.
—NPR, Sunday.