Joe Biden Has Built a Career on Betraying Black Voters

By Branko Marcetic, Jacobin

05 March 20

Joe Biden’s string of primary victories highlights a central paradox of his career: he has secured the loyalty of African American voters while working nonstop to let them down.

n underwhelming start for Joe Biden’s campaign in February seemed to mark it as dead in the water. Now he’s back —and it’s in large part thanks to African-American voters.

After his big South Carolina win on the back of strong black support revived his campaign, Biden solidified his place as the front-runner through a series of wins in Southern states on Super Tuesday, with (mostly older) African Americans in those states backing him in larger numbers.

Biden has carefully cultivated loyal Democratic voters in the black community, both in this campaign and throughout his decades in Washington. “My entire life I’ve been involved with the black community,” he said during the last debate. “My entire career has been wrapped up in dealing with civil rights and civil liberties.”

But surveying Biden’s record, one is left with a different impression: that Biden has, in fact, built a career on the back of steadfast African-American support while consistently betraying those same voters.

Elected as county councilman in 1970, Biden was known as an advocate for public housing, earning him racist abuse from bigoted locals in Delaware. Yet he quickly assured the press about his public housing stance: “I am not a Crusader Rabbit championing the rights of people.”

True to his word, when plans for a controversial moderate-income housing project came to the New Castle County Council in 1972 — one opposed by a crowd of hundreds who attended the meeting — Biden voted with the rest of the council to table it indefinitely. More accurately, Biden disappeared after a recess, and the vote had to be delayed until he could be found and his vote put on the record. When the county’s housing authority later drew up plans to buy a complex to convert to “non-elderly” public housing, the agency’s outreach to discuss the plan with Biden fell on deaf ears; Biden was too busy campaigning for the Senate.

Upon entering the Senate, Biden went where one would expect a champion of civil rights to go: on the Senate Banking Committee, where he worked on bills to regulate predatory private debt collection and sat on its housing subcommittee.

But not for long. Explaining that “other issues are more important for Delaware — the issues of crime and busing,” Biden departed Banking in 1977 for the Judiciary Committee. The decision paved the way for him to become the Senate’s leading liberal opponent of busing and architect of mass incarceration, each of his efforts calamitous to the cause of black equality.

The full significance of Biden’s anti-busing crusade has rarely been explored. Though his 1975 anti-busing amendment failed, by clearing the Senate, it was credited by the Congressional Quarterly as signaling the end of the upper chamber’s previous commitment to defending desegregation measures. Meanwhile, his lasting anti-busing achievement — the 1977 Eagleton-Biden amendment, which barred the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from using its funding for busing — became the bane of existence for civil rights activists and school administrators around the country, whom it blocked from fully implementing desegregation plans. That it had no effect whatsoever on the court-ordered busing in Delaware, the ostensible reason for Biden’s sharp right turn on the issue, didn’t prevent him from being pleased with its impact. Biden was so against busing that, on a Judiciary Committee filled with former segregationists, he became the member who would vote against two historic black nominees to the Justice Department because of their stance on the matter.

Meanwhile, as Biden pushed the flurry of tough-on-crime legislation in the 1980s and 1990s that would prove so disastrous for communities of color, he was well aware of its dangers. He referred to the “political hysteria of the law and order campaigns” of the 1960s and later chided Reagan for his punitive approach: “It costs more money to keep a prisoner in jail than to send your son or daughter to Harvard or Yale,” he told a crowd. As early as 1972, as Biden demagogued on the dangers of crime and drugs for his Senate campaign; one expert whom Biden himself deemed “eminently qualified” to talk about crime trends had complained about politicians misleading the public on the issue; he assumed the expert wasn’t talking about him, Biden said.

The carceral avalanche that resulted was one half of a post–civil rights counterrevolution; the other took place in the courts. As a member and later chair of the Judiciary Committee, Biden let through several hard-right justices to the Supreme Court, Anthony Kennedy chief among them. Handpicked by Biden as a nominee acceptable to Democrats, he praised Kennedy throughout his confirmation hearing while feeding him softballs, hoping they could “all get out of here,” declining to investigate his anti-abortion views and earlier controversial rulings. Once on the court, Kennedy completed its right-wing takeover, working with his fellow conservatives to weaken civil rights protections. Biden’s failure was compounded four years later with the Clarence Thomas nomination, when, at Republicans’ behest, he did everything humanly possible to undermine Anita Hill’s testimony about the judge’s sexual harassment.

All the while, Biden lectured Democrats to forget the multiracial coalition that formed the bedrock of their party and move closer to the politics of the suburban South. “You have been where the Democratic Party was, and now the Democratic Party must be where you are,” he told Democrats in North Carolina as he toured with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). At one stop in Alabama, he dropped from his stump speech references to police brutalization of civil rights protesters and his (nonexistent) civil rights activism.

Key to his argument was that Democrats had “lost the middle class” by becoming beholden to “special interests” and “interest groups,” who “had a stranglehold on us.” But Biden meant something very specific with these innocuous-sounding terms. Even earlier in his career, he had referred to “minorities and other vested interests” and blamed unchecked growth in federal spending on constituent interest groups who wouldn’t give up on programs they benefited from. As he told the NAACP Convention in 1986: “You can’t try to pit the Rainbow Coalition, blacks, Hispanics, poor whites, gays, against the middle class.” For good measure, he pointedly snubbed Jesse Jackson by publicly ruling him out as his running mate. Jackson hit back, griping about unnamed deficit-cutters “combing their hair to the left like Kennedy and moving their policies to the right like Reagan.”

“It’s about time politicians stop making pro-black speeches before pro-black groups and pro-labor speeches before the labor groups,” Biden once said. “People don’t want to hear what they think you think they want to hear.”

Yet throughout his career, Biden would routinely and cravenly change his talking points depending on whether he was speaking to a black audience. Upon receiving a 1978 endorsement from Howard Jarvis, the anti-tax businessman who had backed California’s Proposition 13, Biden’s office issued a statement that he was “delighted,” and that Jarvis had “recognized the fact that I have consistently voted for lower taxes and lower government spending.” Days later, talking to a mostly black audience, he warned them about the consequences of measures like Proposition 13, before saying he didn’t “have any feeling about [Jarvis’s] endorsement.” Twenty-four years later, after spending the whole of 2002 pushing for war with Iraq (a conflict hugely unpopular with black voters) and suggesting Saddam Hussein was connected to Al-Qaeda, he turned around a month after voting for the war to tell an audience of African-American columnists that it was “the dumbest thing in the world,” and that he didn’t “consider the war on Iraq the war on terror.”

Then there’s Biden’s infamous 2003 eulogy of segregationist and sexual predator Strom Thurmond, the man with whom Biden had worked to shift the US criminal code in a more punitive, unforgiving direction. Today, Biden’s South Carolina eulogy is viewed as an uncomfortable relic of a less enlightened era; in reality, it was unusual even then. Not only was Biden one of only two Democrats to show up to the funeral (the other, Fritz Hollings, had served with Thurmond for thirty-six years in the state), he was one of a mere seven of 225 living former and sitting senators to do so. Thurmond, who had famously filibustered the 1957 Civil Rights Act into oblivion, was a “brave man” whose “lasting impact” was a “gift to us all,” Biden told attendees.

That’s not to mention Biden’s long history of taking aim at entitlements like Social Security, a program of enormous importance to African Americans, and which large numbers of black Americans rely on to survive.

It’s one of those strange ironies of history that Biden, having spent a career betraying African Americans on key, consequential issues, now counts them as the main reason for his electoral viability; and that after insisting to Democrats that the party could only survive by prioritizing conservative white voters in the South over its multiracial base, he has been rescued from oblivion by mostly older black voters in the South. The fact that most of those in South Carolina backed him while telling pollsters that the US economic system needs a “complete overhaul” reveals this irony to be a tragedy.

Pardon Me? Donald Trump Is the Fakest (and Realest) News of All

By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

05 March 20

ere’s the truth of it: I’d like a presidential pardon. Really, I would. And I think I deserve it more than Michael Milken or Rod Blagojevich or -- because it’s obviously heading our way -- Roger Stone (not to speak of Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort). Unlike the rest of them, I genuinely deserve a pardon because I don’t even remember being tried or know what I did. Yet somehow, here I am sentenced to what, if things don’t get better -- given my age and his luck -- could prove to be life not in prison but in Trumpland (once known as the United States of America).

Or here’s another possibility that came to mind as I was thinking over my predicament: maybe I can still use that old “get out of jail free card” I saved from my childhood Monopoly set. You know, the one at the bottom of which was written: “This card may be kept until needed or sold.” Well, I need it now. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work anymore, maybe because it was produced before financialization stopped being a kid’s board game and became one for presidents, presidential candidates, and those recently pardoned by you-know-who.

If only this were simply a game I found myself trapped in -- Trumpopoly. Unfortunately, it’s no board game, though I must admit that, more than three years later, I’m officially bored with the man who has surely gotten more attention, more words spoken and written about him, than anyone in history. Even if you included Nebuchadnezzar, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong, I doubt he would have any serious competition.

Honestly, who could even contest that statement, given that nothing he does, no matter how trivial, isn’t dealt with as “news” and covered as if the world were ending? When you think about it, it’s little short of remarkable. And I’m not even talking about Donald Trump’s non-stop coverage on his own news service, also known as Fox News. No, what I had in mind was the Fake News Media itself, regularly identified by the president as his major enemy. (“Our primary opponent is the Fake News Media. They are now beyond Fake, they are Corrupt.”) 

He’s not wrong, if by corruption you mean the over-coverage of him. The truth is that, whether you’re talking about the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, or MSNBC, none of them can get enough of him. Ever. They cover his rallies; they cover his tweets; they cover his impromptu news conferences in the north driveway of the White House, often as if nothing else on Earth were going on.

“Cover” might not even be the right word for it, unless you’re thinking about a thick, smothering, orange blanket thrown over our American world.

Collusion!

In this Trumpian prison of ours, you really have little choice. Whether you like it or not, whether you want to or not, you’re a witness to the vagaries of one Donald J. Trump, morning, noon, and night, day in, day out. I mean, you know what film the president thinks should have won the best-picture Oscar this year, right? Gone With the Wind, which, after he brought it up, promptly shot to number one on topics trending on Twitter. You have a sense of how many years he expects to remain in the White House (up to 26, as he told one of his rally crowds recently, or assumedly until Barron is ready to take over); you know that he’s a “germophobe” (small tip: don’t cough or sneeze in his presence and the next time you meet him, don’t try to shake his hand); you’re probably aware that his properties in India (as well as his pronunciation of Indian names) leave something to be desired, but that the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas is buzzing along (especially when he visits while on the campaign trail). And here are some other things you might have caught as well: that you and I have spent quite a little fortune (up to $650 a night per agent) putting up the Secret Service people protecting him at Trump properties; that, thanks to a tweeted photo of him on a windy day, he has quite a tan line (or that, as he tweeted back, “More Fake News. This was photoshopped, obviously, but the wind was strong and the hair looks good? Anything to demean!"); or that he hates being told, especially by American intelligence officials, no less “Shifty Schiff,” that Vladimir Putin would like to lend his reelection a hand, but loves it that the Russian prexy may have a yen to promote Bernie Sanders in this election season; that his greatest skill (à la The Apprentice and The Celebrity Apprentice) may be firing people he considers personally disloyal to him (even if it’s called purging when you’re the president and they’re government officials or bureaucrats), hence his three years in office represent the greatest turnover in Washington officialdom in presidential memory; or perhaps the way he tweets charges and claims of every sort (that, for instance, Mitt Romney is a “Democratic spy”); or all the people he actually knows but claims he doesn’t; or his urge to slam every imaginable, or even unimaginable, figure ranging from the forewoman of the Roger Stone jury ("She somehow weaseled her way onto the jury and if that's not a tainted jury then there is no such thing as a tainted jury") to the 598 “people, places, and things” the New York Times counted him insulting by May 2019, including John McCain (23 times, “last in his class”) and his daughter Meghan (four times, “obnoxious”); oh, and let’s not forget his threats to unleash nuclear weapons on North Korea (“They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”) and Afghanistan (“And if we wanted to do a certain method of war, we would win that very quickly. But many, many -- really, tens of millions of people would be killed..."). And that, of course, is barely a hint of the world we now inhabit, thanks not just to Donald J. Trump, but to the very Fake News Media that he denounces so incessantly.

We’re here in Trump’s version of a prison in part because he and the Fake News Media he hates so much are in eternal collusion as well as eternal collision! Much as they theoretically dislike each other, both the non-Fox mainstream media and the president seem to desperately need each other. After all, in a social media-dominated world, the traditional media has had its troubles. Papers have been losing revenue, folding, drying up, dying. Staffs have been plunging and local news suffering. (In my own hometown rag, the New York Times, undoubtedly because many copyeditors were dumped, small errors now abound in the paper paper, which I still read, in a way that once would have been unimaginable.)  On TV, of course, you have cable news networks that need to talk about something quite literally 24/7.

So what a godsend it must be to be able to assign reporter after reporter and commentator after commentator to the doings of a single man, his words, acts, impulses, tweets, concerns, bizarre comments, strange thoughts, odd acts. Who could doubt that he has, in these years, become the definition of “the news” in a way that once would have been inconceivable but couldn’t be more convenient for a pressed and harried media?

And however much he may endlessly denounce them, he desperately needs them, too. Otherwise, what would he do for attention? They’re, in effect, his servants and he, in some strange way, theirs. No matter what they officially think of each other, this is the definition of collusion -- one that has, in the last three years, also helped redefine the nature of our American world. No matter what they say about each other, in his own fashion, he’s always ready to pardon them and they, in their own fashion, him.

And here I am -- don’t think I’m not feeling guilty about it -- covering him, too, today. It seems I can't help myself. After all, I’m in the same prison world as everyone else in this country, including reporters.

Pardon Him? You Bet!

By the way, give you-know-who credit where it’s due. He may be 73 years old, but he’s grasped the tweetable moment in a way that’s been beyond impressive from that fateful day in June 2015 when he rode a Trump Tower escalator into the presidential race, praising his future “great, great wall” (to be paid for by Mexico), and denouncing the “Mexican rapists” who had to go. In attention-getting terms, he had anything but a 73-year-old’s sense of how this world actually works and, let’s be honest, that was impressive.

At some basic level, the results of what he grasped are no less so. After all -- god save us -- he might even find himself in the White House for a second term (if the coronavirus or Bernie Sanders doesn’t take him down first).

Donald Trump is obviously no founding father but, despite his weight, you could perhaps think of him as something like a founding feather, a phenomenon carried by the latest political winds into the grim future of us all. And what a future it’s likely to be if this president, a genuine arsonist when it comes to heating the planet to the boiling point, gets reelected. (He could singlehandedly give William Blake’s classic poem, “Tyger, Tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the night,” new meaning.)

I, on the other hand, find myself trapped in his world but, in a sense, from elsewhere. Sometimes I wonder if I’m really living in the world I seem to inhabit or if I’m not already, in Australian terms, in some kind of midsummer night’s dream or rather nightmare? 

I’m just a couple of years older than The Donald and yet if he represents the most modern of 73-year-old realities, then I’m from a past age. I can’t even tweet, having never learned that modern form of conspiracy haiku.  Has anyone, no matter how much younger than him, grasped as fully or creatively as he did the all-too-modern sense of how to demand and command attention on a 24/7 basis? There has been nothing like him or his version of a presidency in our history.

Now, to be honest with you, I’m sick of both Donald Trump and the fake news media. No, I mean it.  Sometimes, I dream of bringing back my long-dead parents and showing them our Trumpian world in which, for instance, Americans fight a range of endlessly unsuccessful wars across a remarkable swath of the planet. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is indulged in its urge to recreate a militarized version of the Cold War, including a new multi-trillion dollar nuclear arms race; a world in which, however -- and this would have been beyond comprehension to them -- “infrastructure week” in Washington, the very idea of putting significant sums of money into rebuilding the crumbling basics in this country, has become little short of a joke. Oh, and of course, I’d have to tell them that, since their deaths, we -- some of us at least -- have accepted that the planet itself, thanks to the burning of fossil fuels, is now overheating in a radical way.

There is, however, one thing I’ve never doubted about The Donald: that, as he did with his five flaming, bankrupt casinos in Atlantic City in the early 1990s, when the moment comes, he’ll jump ship in the nick of time, money in hand, leaving the rest of us to go down on the USS Constitution (with no get-out-of-jail-free card in sight).

Pardon me? Don’t count on it. Pardon you. I wouldn’t hold my breath. But pardon him? You bet! Consider it a done deal.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs TomDispatch.com and is a fellow of the Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.