Biden in 2007: Barack Obama is "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate, and bright & clean."
President Joe Biden is "down" with Black voters and I'm not speaking street slang. A new USA Today/Suffolk University Poll reveals one in five Black voters say they will support a third-party candidate instead of the president. That's down substantially from the 92% of non-Hispanic Blacks who voted for Biden in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center.
The president's strategy for shoring up his and Democrats' most loyal supporters? Telling them their biggest threat is "white supremacy."- Nothing about the failing schools so many poor and minority children feel trapped in;
- or violence in big cities that kill many young Black men most weekends and increasingly during the week;
- or the disproportionate abortion rate among Black women that has kept their percentage of the population mostly stagnant;
- or the necessity of putting more Black fathers in homes to provide loving disciple to their children.
Biden has a long history of using race as a political weapon – while doing little to improve the lives of Black Americans.
Speaking at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where in 2015 a white gunman shot and killed nine members of a Bible study, Biden again demonstrated his insincerity about race by making statements that have been proven false.
- He claimed to have been a "civil rights activist."
- He wasn't.
- He claimed to have "spent more time in the Bethel AME Church in Wilmington, Delaware, than most people I know, Black or white."
- He hasn't.
- He also claimed that church was "where I started a civil rights movement."
- He didn't.
- As early as 1977, Biden said that forced busing to desegregate schools would cause his children to "grow up in a racial jungle."
- In 2007, he referred to Barack Obama as "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean."
- He has claimed to have been arrested during civil rights demonstrations, and while on the way to see Nelson Mandela in prison.
- Neither is true.
- Biden claimed to have persuaded segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond to vote for the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
- Wrong on two counts.
- Thurmond did not vote for the act, and
- Biden was not in the Senate in 1964.
- Wrong on two counts.
There was also his 2006 remark:
- "You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent."
- In 2020, he said if Blacks didn't vote for him, "you ain't Black."
- In 2010, he warmly eulogized Sen. Robert Byrd – a former Exalted Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan – saying he was "one of my mentors"... and that "the Senate is a lesser place for his going."
- So many more examples, but not enough space.
White supremacy is a minority view. Christians call it a sin. There are no pure-bred people. We are all mixed up in the great gene pool of life, as Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. has brilliantly demonstrated in several PBS programs on African American lives. To hate another person because of their race is to hate a part of one's self.
Given the declining poll numbers for Biden, among especially young Black voters, it would appear they are starting to figure out how Democrats have duped them for decades. Biden's out-of-touch speech in Charleston is likely to do little to improve his favorability among their party's once solid voting bloc.
Cal Thomas is one of America's most widely read & syndicated columnists, whose column is syndicated by Tribune Media Services in Chicago. He began his 40-year journalism career as a copy-boy for NBC News in Washington, D.C., and worked as a General Assignment Reporter & Anchor for both KPRC-TV in Houston and NBC News in Washington. For over 16 years, his column has been distributed by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate.
