Last night, I watched as the news anchor breathlessly reported that some poll, somewhere, showed that Kamala Harris had ripped into Joe Biden’s once-prodigious lead as front-runner for the Democratic nomination for President. I understand that the 24-hour news cycle constantly requires fresh meat on which to chew, but that announcement was equivalent to saying that Rocky IV was the best Rocky movie since Rocky III.
Harris has been universally lauded for her emotional recollection of her experience with busing to achieve desegregation in the 1970s, using it as a platform to point out that the young politician Joe Biden was on the wrong side of the issue. And then Joe Biden, who shoots himself in the foot on a ridiculously regular basis, made things worse for himself.
Biden is an incredibly frustrating political figure. He seems like a nice guy, he’s been through hell in his personal life, and he is usually (but not always) on the right side of history. But he has this habit of impromptu self-damage. Pundits generously refer to his screw-ups as “gaffes,” but they’re flat-out self-inflicted wounds, like his using his willingness and ability to work with blatant racists back in the 1970s in a nostalgic look back at lost “civility” in the United States Senate.
In the “debate,” Biden looked flustered after Harris’ broadside and never really regained his footing. Now he’s got to answer questions about votes he made nearly half a century ago and stand up to a whole lot of young firebrand neo-liberals over his stance on an issue that tore America apart years or even decades before they were born. It’s one thing to honor the sacrifices of Congressman John Lewis, who marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama and received a fractured skull for his efforts. There’s no “other side” to the battle for civil rights.
But people who take the time to delve deeply into the issue of busing are going to find that it was not all cut and dried, us against them. As Howard Blume recently put it in the Los Angeles Times, “The wave of anti-busing populism…included parents who were horrified by overt racism, but who opposed putting their children on buses…”
It was an ugly time and Joe Biden didn’t do himself proud in the matter. But for others to chime in with, “If I had been there at that time, I would have done this, this and this…”
Yeah, maybe you would have and maybe you wouldn’t have. It’s human nature to mentally put yourself in a situation and imagine that you would have done the right thing, even in the face of scorn or even personal danger. We’ve all done it. I actually went shopping at the Safeway on Oracle and Ina a couple hours before Gabrielle Giffords got shot. I sometimes wonder what I would have done had I been there during the shooting. I would like to think that I would have grabbed a jar of spaghetti sauce out of my bag, thrown it with perfect accuracy at the coward and then tackled him. But the reality is that I would have probably ducked or run.
I have friends who are gun guys and they always tell me stories that begin with, “Aw man, if I had been there…” But there’s that well-trained cop who’s going to be put on trial because he froze outside that Florida high school while some little punk killed 17 people. And just today I read that a Las Vegas cop who froze one floor below the madman who slaughtered 58 people out the window of his hotel room got fired.
When I was growing up, the Los Angeles City School District was the ultimate example of de facto segregation. My high school was more than 90 percent minority. Yet, seven miles west (but on the other side of I-5) was Granada Hills High, which was over 98 percent white. The schools in East L.A. (Roosevelt, Garfield) were almost entirely Hispanic. The schools downtown (Manual Arts, Fremont) were almost all-black. There were huge Samoan populations at Narbonne and Gardena. That’s just how it was.
I had already come to Arizona for college when the busing happened but I followed it closely. The anger in L.A. was equal to anything they had in Boston. I remember seeing an African-American woman on the news who said, “Why should my child have to endure a two-hour, round-trip bus ride every day just to get a better education? Why not just fix our (local) schools?”
Still, most of the people who were screaming the loudest were unabashed racists and so the inclination was to take the other side. But one of the hard things about being an adult is learning that not every issue has a clearly right side and a clearly wrong side.
Biden should have looked at the other people on the stage and said, “You like to think you know what you would have done 40-something years ago, but you don’t. And to you, Senator Harris, yes, you were riding one of those buses, but if you had been a senator from California at that time, would you have voted for a federal law to force busing across the entire United States?
“Maybe you would have and maybe you wouldn’t have…” ■
This article appears in Jul 11-17, 2019.
Joe Biden represents, for a lot of Americans, a bit of nostalgia for a bygone era where at least you felt like you were walking on terra firma and not in quick sand. He is not the perfect candidate for the 21st century or for a “vision” OF A BETTER America. He is leading the pack because what he offers is stability in a very unstable Country. The vast majority of America is so fatigued and fearful of another 4 years of Trump that they will eschew for now all the promises of candidates who offer real progressive change for one that just give us four years of sanity. Yes, its come down to this. On the one hand its very sad; and on the other…..who can blame anyone who will pull the lever for Biden.
Biden is the past a bygone era. I won’t go back. There is not a Democrat running that has an understanding of the economy and world negotiations as Trump does. I will endure the rest. If Trump wins maybe the Dems will get the message we don’t want open borders socialism. Maybe they won’t but they have positioned Biden to lose.
I honestly believe we have had our day with elderly white men. I own that… I am one. I do not believe that his penchant to speak, show vulnerability and act according to instinct can be faulted. His presentation is an honest representation of how he got to be who he is. That said, he is and always has been a second choice. It would not be hard to give anyone a pass in the time of tRump. I, for one, do not want to settle for a pass or a second choice. I dislike voting against someone or something. I want to vote for someone or something that I can believe in, aspire to support, and work actively on the behalf of. The time to shovel shit out of the Whitehouse is after we anoint leadership to ascertain a constructive use for the rubble left by the what needs to be the previous administration.
I spent five years fighting the heinous 2005 Bankruptcy Reform Act, which was written by and for credit card companies. Biden, the elected representative of said companies, fought tooth and nail for the bill and fought against any changes or compromises to it. It passed with a combination of GOP and Democratic support. The impact has been record profits for credit card companies, record consumer and student debt, the universal policy of hospitals to demand a credit card before they will treat you, the inability of consumers to discharge debt in bankruptcy, no relief from student debt (until Obama tried to help), and the deepening of the 2008 real estate crash as homeowners were unable to adjust their mortgages down to the current value of their homes. I will reluctantly vote for Biden if hes the nominee, but understand that he is a corporate shill of the first order, with a lifelong habit of voting against consumers and for their creditors.
@BuffCrone Your comment shows the ignorance of Americans today. Home values dropping had no effect on borrowers as they signed on to a mortgage and paid it until word spread that they would be able to change the terms of their loans. How many over bought based on their own ignorance?
I can only think of the laughable comparison of buying a tank of gas for your car, then seeing prices dropped, and going back and asking for a refund. “Buyer beware” was actually supposed to make us all more aware of contractual obligations, not dumber.
The mess we have with China, and Iran was caused by the old guard (of all colors) and Trump is wading through the sludge. I give him credit for standing up for America when many Americans won’t stand up for him.
Biden is being drug further left by the new socialist radicals that feel they need to change everything. That is something we will all regret, because bottom line is, we have it pretty darn good in this country. Look at all the world that wants to sneak in.
@Hard to Trump Trump: Your comments show the ignorance of the uneducated right. Most rocks have a better understanding of the economy and world negotiations than Trump does. And you obviously know nothing about socialism if you think that’s a position or principle of the Democratic Party. And to @Change Isn’t Always Good: the 2005 Bankruptcy Reform Act is one of the most anti-consumer pieces of legislation in a generation, and Biden’s complicity should doom him as the Democratic candidate. And giving credit to trump any ANY REASON whatsoever serves to illustrate your ignorance as well. He doesn’t stand up for America; he just makes a lot of noise and displays his buffoonery.
Plagiarism aside, I’d love to see ” Sleepy Joe” run for president. The best part would be the first ( and last) debate. When he sees that he’s getting slaughtered, he gets up and takes a swing at Trump. That would be interesting.
dsimpson- look me up in Nov. 2020.
Re:dsimpson I didn’t mention bankruptcy in my comment but it was simply homeowners walking away when values dipped. The Reform Act was to slow the migration towards white flag economics by individuals that hoped for their own tax payer funded bailout.
https://bankruptcy.findlaw.com/chapter-7/faq-bankruptcy-law-changes.html
I see you mentioning “the uneducated right.” Don’t lose sight of the fact that you are here debating others. And you almost accomplished it without name calling.
I would dislike it too if I was a Democrat and this is the best my party had to offer.