Opinion: Biden babbles about Obama
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Having endured Sen. Joe Biden’s windbaggery at the confirmation hearings for John Roberts and Sam Alito, I’m tempted to join in the journalistic piling-on over Biden’s botched tribute to Sen. Barack Obama. But it’s because I know Biden’s mouth runs ahead of his mind that I’m inclined to cut him some slack for his comment that the senator from Illinois is ‘the first mainstream African American [candidate] who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.’
Before pronouncing absolution, though, I’ll concede that Biden’s motormouth seemed to take him over some dubious byways in American political discourse. When a white politician in past times referred to a black politician as ‘articulate,’ the unspoken qualifier sometimes was ‘unlike a lot of other black people.’ Sometimes it wasn’t unspoken. Early in my editorial-writing career, I heard an older colleague effusively praise a black politician who had come calling for an endorsement before adding: ‘Too bad there aren’t more like him,’ or words to that effect.
Does a similar left-handed compliment lurk in some of the effusive praise for Obama that has inspired Timothy Noah of Slate to start a feature called ‘The Obama Messiah Watch’? Maybe. Biden certainly suffered from the perception that in praising Obama so lavishly he was treating him as the exception that proves the rule
Biden’s best defense is that critics are trying to parse precisely a torrent of words uttered without due deliberation. Surely no one believes that in calling Obama ‘clean’ Biden was disparaging the hygiene of other African-American candidates.
Even Biden’s seeming suggestion that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton weren’t articulate disappears with a little common-sense deconstruction. Biden wasn’t saying that Obama was the first articulate (or clean or bright or nice-looking) African-American candidate for president – just that he was the first ‘moderate’ black presidential candidate with those virtues. And, really, who can disagree? On the political spectrum, Jackson, Sharpton and even Shirley Chisholm and Carol Moseley Braun were to the left of where Obama is positioning himself and Alan Keyes was well to his (and everyone else’s) right.
Still, what a horrible way to start a presidential campaign! The hapless Biden would have been better off sticking to his old MO of plagiarizing speeches from British politicians. Not many of them have discoursed about the relative merits of Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama – but I bet they’ve logged a few choice comments about the Irish!