During an interview Thursday with CBS News correspondent Errol Barnett, who is black, Joe Biden was asked if he had taken a cognitive test. Biden fired back: “No, I haven’t taken a test! Why … would I take a test? Come on, man! That’s like saying you, before you got on this program, you take a test where you’re taking cocaine or not. What do you think? Huh? Are you a junkie?”
Later that day, Biden dug his hole even deeper. In an interview with NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro, he contrasted the black and the Hispanic populations in the United States with this: “Unlike the African-American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community with incredibly different attitudes about different things.”
He later tried to make amends: “Earlier today, I made some comments about diversity in the African American and Latino communities that I want to clarify. In no way did I mean to suggest the African American community is a monolith — not by identity, not on issues, not at all.”
But it was too late. The damage was done. He couldn’t unspeak what he had spoken.
Early Friday President Trump tweeted: “Sleepy Joe Biden has lost the Black Vote.”
He deleted that tweet and replaced it with this: “After yesterday’s statement, Sleepy Joe Biden is no longer worthy of the Black Vote.”
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If these were just temporary lapses on Biden’s part — a failure to check his thoughts at the door before uttering them — he might be forgiven. But instead they reflect not only an inability mentally to tally the impact his comments might make on his audience, but a racist mindset that goes back months if not years.
Back in May, Biden appeared on the radio show The Breakfast Club and uttered a comment that continues to haunt him: “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”
Again he later apologized, saying he “should not have been so cavalier,” and added that “I’ve never, never, ever taken the African American community for granted.”
But the black voter community is no longer taking Biden for granted. A Zogby poll in July showed that Biden has the support of barely three-quarters of that voting bloc, down from the 90 percent they have traditionally given Democrat presidential candidates. In that report Zogby noted that Trump had 14-percent support of black voters.
In the latest report from Rasmussen, it was found that black support for Trump is even higher, at 21 percent. This contrasts with traditional black voters’ support for Republican candidates for president at around eight percent.
An analysis from the Democracy Fund/UCLA Nationscape confirmed the melting away of support for Biden from black voters, especially among those aged 18 to 29: Just over two-thirds of them said they would support Biden in November. In 2016, 85 percent of that same cohort supported Hillary Clinton.
This problem for Biden isn’t going away. His latent and historical racist mindset is no longer checked by his mental ability to consider how his remarks might be taken before he utters them. As he is forced to appear more and more frequently in public as the election draws closer, the greater the chances for other mental failures to reveal how he really feels about a most important part of the voting bloc he needs even to come close to challenging Trump in November.
Photo: AP Images
An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American, writing primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
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