EDITORIAL: Biden: Back on the chain gang - Washington Times

EDITORIAL: Biden: Back on the chain gang - Washington Times


Vice President Joe Biden told a racially mixed audience Wednesday that if Republicans take back the White House, “They’re going to put y’all back in chains.” It’s hard to say what is more offensive: Mr. Biden’s overt use of inflammatory racial symbolism, or someone from Delaware saying “y’all.”

Stephanie Cutter, the Obama campaign’s apply-named hatchet man, claimed Mr. Biden was “using a metaphor to talk about what’s going to happen” and that “the bottom line is that we have no problem with those comments.” That makes sense. There’s no reason for the Obama campaign to apologize because hacking at the raw wound of racism is critical to the Democrats’ reelection strategy.

This race is about race because if it were about issues, Democrats would lose. Mr. Obama’s moribund economic record would guarantee that. Democrats haven’t fared well with majority white voters generally at the presidential level. According to Gallup, the only Democratic presidential nominee to win a majority of the white vote in the last 60 years was Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Currently, white men favor Mr. Romney by a 24-point margin, and white women back the Republican ticket by 7 percent, according to Gallup.