Opinion Why Joe Biden won't be the Dem Nominee

[VivaRevolution]

You can't let Joe Biden be Joe Biden.

Will Black Voters Still Love Biden When They Remember Who He Was?
By Eric Levitz@EricLevitz

Say it ain’t Joe. Photo: C-SPAN

Joe Biden once called state-mandated school integration “the most racist concept you can come up with,” and Barack Obama “the first sort of mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean.” He was a staunch opponent of “forced busing” in the 1970s, and leading crusader for mass incarceration throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s. Uncle Joe has described African-American felons as “predators” too sociopathic to rehabilitate — and white supremacist senators as his friends.

And, as of this writing, a plurality of black Democrats want him to be their party’s 2020 nominee.

Whether Biden can retain that support, after voters learn more about his problematic past, could very well determine the outcome of the party’s primary race. To explore that question, let’s pick through the former vice-president’s hefty baggage on racial justice — and then, the case for thinking that Obama’s halo will prove to be brighter than the shadow of Biden’s record is dark

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019...ustice-democratic-primary-2020-explained.html

___________________________________

Joe Biden is going to hide from the lime light as much as possible, but when he does have to be put under the light, he is going to have a hard time defending his past.

Discuss........

 

[VivaRevolution]

Biden helped kill the most effective policy for improving black educational attainment that America has ever known.
Joe Biden was for desegregating America’s schools, until his constituents were against it. When the Delaware Democrat launched his first campaign for the Senate in 1972, the Supreme Court had just ruled that the Constitution required policymakers to pursue “the greatest possible degree of actual desegregation” — and that forcing white students to attend schools in black neighborhoods, and vice versa, was a legitimate means of doing so. Being an enlightened liberal, Biden began his candidacy as an advocate for such policies. He accused Republicans of demagoguing the busing issue, and appealing to white voters’ ugliest instincts.


But as his campaign progressed, and Biden discerned that the arc of history was bending toward white backlash, the young candidate bent with it. He became a caricature of a white northern liberal — arguing that forced busing was appropriate for the South (where segregation was the product of racist laws), but unnecessary for the North (where, Biden pretended, it merely reflected the preferences of the white and black communities).

Once in the Senate, Biden continued to triangulate, voting for most, though not all, f the anti-busing amendments that came before him. But for his overwhelmingly white constituents, nothing less than massive resistance to busing would suffice. The New Castle County Neighborhood Schools Association booed Biden off the stage at one event in 1974. One year later, the Delaware senator broke ranks with northern liberals— and joined his virulently racist North Carolina colleague Jesse Helms in voting to kneecap all federal efforts to integrate schools, anywhere in the country. Specifically, Biden voted to bar the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from requiring schools to provide information on the racial makeup of their student bodies — thereby making it nigh-impossible for Uncle Sam to withhold federal funds from school districts that refused to integrate.

 

[MFIC]

Here to say it in another thread. Liberals won’t support another straight white man. That includes Bernie. Moderate dems will definitely want Biden. Question is, are there enough moderate dems to get Biden in. I don’t think so

 

[VivaRevolution]

The measure was rejected. Nevertheless, Biden persisted. And his cowardly example inspired other self-professed liberals to throw racial justice under the bus. As the historian Jason Sokol writes:

Immediately after the Helms amendment was tabled, Biden proposed his own amendment to the $36 billion education bill, stipulating that none of those federal funds could be used by school systems “to assign teachers or students to schools … for reasons of race.” His amendment would prevent “some faceless bureaucrat” from “deciding that any child, black or white, should fit in some predetermined ratio.”


… Like the Helms gambit, [Biden’s provision] would still gut Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. But this time, a number of liberal senators that had opposed Helms’s amendment now supported Biden: Warren Magnuson and Scoop Jackson of Washington, where Seattle faced impending integration orders; and Thomas Eagleton and Stuart Symington of Missouri, where Kansas City confronted a similar fate. Mike Mansfield, the majority leader from Montana, also jumped on board. Watching his liberal colleagues defect, Republican Jacob Javits of New York mused, “They’re scared to death on busing.” The Senate approved Biden’s amendment. Biden had managed to turn a 48-43 loss for the anti-busing forces into a 50-43 victory.

The NAACP called Biden’s proposal “an anti-black amendment.” The Senate’s sole African-American member, Ed Brooke, called it “the greatest symbolic defeat for civil rights since 1964.” But Biden helped his fellow liberals reconcile themselves to the wrong side of history by recasting integrationists as the real racists.

“The new integration plans being offered are really just quota systems to assure a certain number of blacks, Chicanos, or whatever in each school. That, to me, is the most racist concept you can come up with,” Biden said in a 1975 interview recently unearthed by the Washington Post. “What it says is, ‘In order for your child with curly black hair, brown eyes, and dark skin to be able to learn anything, he needs to sit next to my blond-haired, blue-eyed son.’ That’s racist!”

Biden echoed this in remarks to NPR that same year, saying, “I think the concept of busing … that we are going to integrate people so that they all have the same access and they learn to grow up with one another and all the rest, is a rejection of the whole movement of black pride … a rejection of the entire black awareness concept, where black is beautiful, black culture should be studied; and the cultural awareness of the importance of their own identity, their own individuality.”

As of 2007, Biden believed that this stance had aged well. In a memoir released that year, the soon-to-be presidential candidate derided busing as “a liberal trainwreck.” Education experts disagree. Since some municipalities did integrate their schools through busing (however temporarily), while others did not, scholars have been able to evaluate the policy’s efficacy. In 2011, researchers at Berkeley found that black students who had spent five years in desegregated schools went on to earn (on average) 25 percent more than those who remained in segregated schools (or, in Biden’s phrasing, schools that honored the “black awareness concept”). Other studies have found that racial segregation impairs learning for black students so severely, it outweighs the positive effects associated with higher household income — while integration enhances educational outcomes more profoundly than increasing a school’s safety. Meanwhile, contrary to so many white parents’ fears, integration was not associated with any negative effect on white students’ educational performance.

 

[VivaRevolution]

Biden worked tirelessly, over several decades, to make America’s (profoundly racist) criminal-justice system more punitive than any other advanced democracy’s.
It is hard to name an infamously unjust feature of America’s criminal-justice system that Joe Biden didn’t help to bring about. Mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine, civil asset forfeiture, and extensive use of the death penalty — the Delaware senator was involved in establishing them all.

Biden is famous for his lead role in crafting the 1994 crime bill, or, as the senator preferred to call it (as recently as 2015), the “1994 Biden Crime Bill.” Some aspects of that legislation remain popular within the Democratic Party — among them, the Violence Against Women Act, a federal assault-weapons ban, and funds for “community oriented” policing. But in 2019 America — a place where our nation’s violent crime rate is near historic lows, while its incarceration rate hovers around world-historic highs — the bill’s broader legacy is ignominious. The Brennan Center succinctly summarized that legacy on the 20th anniversary of the bill’s passage:

It expanded the death penalty, creating 60 new death penalty offenses under 41 federal capital statutes. It eliminated education funding for incarcerated students, effectively gutting prison education programs. Despite a wealth of research showing education increases post-release employment, reduces recidivism, and improves outcomes for the formerly incarcerated and their families, this change has not been reversed.

he criticized Republicans for pushing longer sentences for nonviolent offenders when prisons were already overcrowded. But, as with busing, Biden was one of the first liberals to discern the rightward shift in public opinion on criminal justice — and quite possibly, the most enthusiastic convert to the gospel of law-and-order liberalism. During the 1980s, Biden helped pass laws reinstating the federal death penalty, abolishing federal parole, increasing penalties for marijuana possession, expanding the use of civil asset forfeiture, and establishing a 100-to-1 sentencing disparity for possession of crack cocaine (used disproportionately by poor nonwhite people) and powder cocaine (used disproportionately by rich white people).

Biden’s support for these measures wasn’t a wholly defensive responsive to public outrage over violent crime. Rather, it was a proactive effort to capitalize on the electorate’s increasingly draconian mood.

CNN’s KFile, Biden raised awareness of the (mythical) threat posed by super-predators — a rising generation of inner city children so comprehensively failed by their parents and society, they had developed into incurable sociopaths whom the state could quarantine but never rehabilitate.

 

[bobgeese]

You’re pretending the democrats actually care what black folks think or want.

 

[tehJameson]

You’re pretending the democrats actually care what black folks think or want.

And republicans do?

 

[andnowweknow]

why people are so sure anyone in particular will be the democrat nominee at this point is beyond me.

I'd say it's much more likely than not Biden will not be the nominee but that's just my opinion. Long way to go, there will be little clarity for months.

 

[MFIC]

You’re pretending the democrats actually care what black folks think or want.

Well they do kind of care what they think because they want their vote. They just don’t actually care about them. They want them to struggle. They want them to feel vulnerable. They want them to think republican policies are a threat to them. They want to offer them them help. They just don’t want them to be to successful because then they might begin to lean right.

 

[7437]

The same sort of thing were said about Hillary and the superpreadator comments. She still had the support of black voters.

 

[JamesRussler]

Biden’s problem is those early primary states. Iowa has a funny habit of killing “perceived frontrunner” momentum, and NH has a strong Bernie following. If he loses both of those, his enthusiasm might dry up completely. That’s why it’s important to manage expectations competently.

My money is on Kamala. She is a good debater, and she will get more attention once candidates are side by side. She will shine in places like SC and NV which have larger minority populations.

 

[vengeful]

lol I thought these liberal stations/site were siding with Biden and trying to be against Bernie? I've seen plenty of criticism on Biden for his 94 crime bill support, for being pro-segregation, and hell CNN has an article up today about Biden praising a segregationist.

 

[WarDosAnjos]

I pray you're right. The guy is a joke. He registers as a Dem so the Uneducated Crooked Right are quick to attack him and call him a "commie" but the truth is he is a oppressive big money right winger like the rest of them. The only difference between a guy like Biden and Trump are what they call themselves politically. Right wing America conned again and again.

 

[PEB]

Biden’s problem is those early primary states. Iowa has a funny habit of killing “perceived frontrunner” momentum, and NH has a strong Bernie following. If he loses both of those, his enthusiasm might dry up completely. That’s why it’s important to manage expectations competently.

My money is on Kamala. She is a good debater, and she will get more attention once candidates are side by side. She will shine in places like SC and NV which have larger minority populations.

I live right next to New Hampshire they are not that strong on Bernie. Bernie beat Hillary because he lived in the state for like a month before the Democratic primary. If Hillary had done the same she would have cleaned his clock. Hillary spent more time in Iowa an Pennsylvania allowing her to win. New Hampshire tends to pull more conservative on issues.

 

[ocean size]

You can't let Joe Biden be Joe Biden.

Will Black Voters Still Love Biden When They Remember Who He Was?
By Eric Levitz@EricLevitz

Say it ain’t Joe. Photo: C-SPAN

Joe Biden once called state-mandated school integration “the most racist concept you can come up with,” and Barack Obama “the first sort of mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean.” He was a staunch opponent of “forced busing” in the 1970s, and leading crusader for mass incarceration throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s. Uncle Joe has described African-American felons as “predators” too sociopathic to rehabilitate — and white supremacist senators as his friends.

And, as of this writing, a plurality of black Democrats want him to be their party’s 2020 nominee.

Whether Biden can retain that support, after voters learn more about his problematic past, could very well determine the outcome of the party’s primary race. To explore that question, let’s pick through the former vice-president’s hefty baggage on racial justice — and then, the case for thinking that Obama’s halo will prove to be brighter than the shadow of Biden’s record is dark

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019...ustice-democratic-primary-2020-explained.html

___________________________________

Joe Biden is going to hide from the lime light as much as possible, but when he does have to be put under the light, he is going to have a hard time defending his past.

Discuss........

I dunno. All this stuff was equally true prior to 2012 and 2018 and it wasn't an issue. Sure it is different when you are running for the top spot but still.

And I dunno but all of the presuming what black people should think of things in articles like this seems misguided at best. Heavy sentencing for example- in the 90s, 3 out of 4 black people were for the three strikes law. They were disproportionately likely to be victimised by crime so it was well intended at the time. They aren't stupid, most black people over 40 will remember having supported Biden at the time even if it is now unpopular.

 

[VivaRevolution]

I dunno. All this stuff was equally true prior to 2012 and 2018 and it wasn't an issue. Sure it is different when you are running for the top spot but still.

And I dunno but all of the presuming what black people should think of things in articles like this seems misguided at best. Heavy sentencing for example- in the 90s, 3 out of 4 black people were for the three strikes law. They were disproportionately likely to be victimised by crime so it was well intended at the time. They aren't stupid, most black people over 40 will remember having supported Biden at the time even if it is now unpopular.

And cuddling up to Jesse Helms?

Also people supported Iraq at the time. Doesn't make it a good idea, or inspire confidence in leadership when you were proven wrong.

 

[ocean size]

And cuddling up to Jesse Helms?

Also people supported Iraq at the time. Doesn't make it a good idea, or inspire confidence in leadership when you were proven wrong.

Working with another senator to get legislation passed despite political differences isn't something Joe is going to be ashamed of. He is willing to talk all about it, go about half way down the text of his speech: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.go...arks-vice-president-yale-university-class-day
Regarding Iraq, unless I find out a certain politician was aware there was no WMD and put us there anyway, I am not going to fault someone for being for the war at a time high school me stayed up to try and catch some 'shock and awe' on the live feed on the first day of invasion. At that point over 70% of Americans were pro invasion. Even if Joe should have been older and wiser, than me, I'm not going to hold someone else to much different level of hindsight. 60% of Democratic senators voted for Iraq, and while I would now look more favorably on those that didn't, it isn't a dealbreaker for me or most other voters that someone was for the war and thought there was justification at the time.

 

[hillelslovak87]

Fuck Joe Biden, bruh!

 

[Sketch]

Sleepy Joe will be your nominee and you will like it.

 

[Terry Noonan]

But did he brag about sleeping with women to access tv anchor? Because that was terrible.