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Both candidates revived that debate this week, when they ran up
against the issue of race, spotlighting their relationship with
the African-American community, a vital Democratic constituency.
For Biden, it was his boast of working with avowed
segregationists in the Senate in the name of civility and
getting things done. For Buttigieg, it was dealing with the
aftermath of the fatal police shooting of a black man in South
Bend, Indiana, where he serves as mayor.
The controversies again raised questions about whether either is
the best choice to galvanize black voters as the Democratic
nominee against Republican President Donald Trump in the
November 2020 presidential election.
Democrats have emphasized the importance of African-American
voters for next year's election after black turnout dipped in
2016 when Hillary Clinton was the Democratic nominee.
"There is a huge elephant in the room this cycle - which is
race," said Quentin James, executive director of The Collective
PAC, which is working to ensure a black candidate is on the
Democratic ticket.
At a fundraiser earlier this week, Biden, 76, talked of working
as a young senator with Southern Democrats Herman Talmadge and
James Eastland.
While discussing Eastland, a senator from Mississippi who
described black people as inferior and fought against efforts to
desegregate the South, Biden said: "He never called me boy, he
always called me son.”
He was swiftly criticized by several other presidential
candidates, including U.S. Senators Cory Booker, Kamala Harris
and Elizabeth Warren.
When Booker, an African-American who is almost 30 years younger
than Biden, called on him to apologize, Biden responded by
defending his civil rights record and saying Booker should
apologize to him. "There's not a racist bone in my body," he
said.
Booker was visibly upset in an interview with CNN afterward,
saying Biden, who served two terms as vice president to Barack
Obama - America's first black president - had missed the point
about the harm his words caused.
"What matters to me is that a guy running to be head of our
party, which is a significantly diverse and wondrous party,
doesn't understand or can't even acknowledge that he made a
mistake," Booker said. "He knows better."
The front-runner for the Democratic nomination, Biden has long
championed civil rights and was honored earlier this year by Al
Sharpton's National Action Network. At a fundraiser on
Wednesday, he cited civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
as an inspiration for entering public service and spoke of
fighting segregation alongside the late Senator Edward Kennedy.
But James argued the base of the Democratic Party had shifted
beneath Biden's feet. Since his campaign began, Biden has
strived to persuade progressive elements of the party that he is
in step with them on issues such as abortion and climate change.
This week’s flap “continues a narrative for Biden that he is not
in line with the future of the party,” James said.
Nancy Pelosi, who as speaker of the House of Representatives is
the top elected U.S. Democrat, defended Biden on Thursday,
calling him "authentic."
"Joe Biden seems to have tremendous support in the
African-American community. But it's for them to decide, it's
not for me to make a judgment as to how they're going to react
to him," she said.
RAW RELATIONS
Buttigieg has spent the week dealing with a crisis in South
Bend, after a white police officer shot a black man early on
Sunday who he said had flashed a knife. The officer's body
camera had been switched off. Buttigieg canceled campaign events
and returned home.
He has had at times a rocky relationship with the city's black
residents, stemming from his decision to fire the
African-American police chief early in his mayoral tenure and
criticism that poorer neighborhoods have not benefited from his
efforts to revitalize the local economy.
Openly gay, Buttigieg, 37, has been an effective fundraiser in
part because of backing from the LGBTQ community. But he has
acknowledged he has largely failed to win over black voters in
critical early voting states such as South Carolina.
"We know it's going to take extra work because I'm not from a
community of color and also was not a famous person when this
process began," Buttigieg said last week in Charleston, South
Carolina. "We're working very energetically, very actively, in
order to invite more people and specifically black voters into
this campaign."
Bolstered by his partnership with Obama, Biden has long enjoyed
strong support from black voters in South Carolina and
elsewhere.
Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist in Columbia, South
Carolina, said that while that was unlikely to change, Booker
and Harris, another African-American candidate, could now siphon
off some of that support.
He said Biden erred in attacking Booker, who trails him
significantly in opinion polls. "You don't punch down," he said.
Buttigieg, Seawright said, was in deeper trouble. "He's polling
at zero percent," with black voters in the state, he said. The
trouble in South Bend, "is just another lump in his political
carpet."
(Reporting by James Oliphant; Additional reporting by Susan
Cornwell in Washington; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Peter
Cooney)
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