Joe Biden needs to learn some humility if he ever wants to be president. He talks too much, doesn't have self-control, and either doesn't listen to his friends and advisers who tell him to learn to shut up once in a while, or he's such a jerk they don't even dare tell him. Either way, diarrhea of the mouth, and what it suggests about the brain, is the kind of thing that is dangerous in a president, let alone a presidential candidate.
“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
Yes, who isn't tired of of all those unclean, stupid, ebonics-speaking African-Americans in politics?
Okay, what Biden was trying to say, I think, was that Obama is quite possibly the first serious black presidential candidate who doesn't scare white people (or at least a good segment of white people). And I think that's true. Jesse Jackson? Scary (yeah, a lot of you like him, a lot of us don't). Alan Keyes? Insane. Al Sharpton? I find him funny, but he's still fighting the Tawana Brawley image. What other serious black candidates have we had? So, yes, in that context, Obama is the first candidate that doesn't routinely scare white people - and that's part of the reason Republicans are trying to smear him as a scary madrassa-attending radical Muslim.
But that's not what Biden said. He said we haven't had any black candidates who have been articulate, bright and clean. Jackson, Keyes, and Sharpton are all articulate, bright and clean. So what exactly was Biden's point?
If this were Biden's first racist "bimbo eruption," we could write it off as a simple mistake. But it's not.
