OPINION:
President Biden is “down” with Black voters, and I’m not speaking street slang.
A new USA Today/Suffolk University Poll reveals 1 in 5 Black voters say they will support a third-party candidate instead of the president. That’s down substantially from the 92% of non-Hispanic Blacks who voted for Mr. Biden in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center.
The president’s strategy for shoring up his and Democrats’ most loyal supporters? Telling them the biggest threat to them is White supremacy.
He says nothing about the failing schools so many poor and minority children feel trapped in, the violence in big cities that kills many young Black men, the disproportionate abortion rate among Black women that has kept their percentage of the population mostly stagnant, or the necessity of putting more Black fathers in homes to provide loving discipline to their children.
Mr. Biden has a long history of using race as a political weapon while doing little to improve the lives of Black Americans.
Speaking at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where in 2015 a White gunman shot and killed nine members of a Bible study, Mr. Biden again demonstrated his insincerity about race by making statements that have been proved false.
He claimed to have been a “civil rights activist.” He wasn’t.
He claimed to have “spent more time in the Bethel AME Church in Wilmington, Delaware, than most people I know, Black or White.” He hasn’t.
He also claimed that church was “where I started a civil rights movement.” He didn’t.
As a New York Post editorial noted, Mr. Biden has “pushed such baloney time and again.” He has claimed to have been arrested at civil rights demonstrations and while on the way to see Nelson Mandela in prison. Neither is true.
Mr. Biden claimed to have persuaded segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond to vote for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Wrong on two counts. Thurmond did not vote for the act, and Mr. Biden was not in the Senate in 1964.
There was also this 2006 remark: “You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.” In 2020, he said if Blacks didn’t vote for him, “you ain’t Black.” In 2010, he warmly eulogized Sen. Robert Byrd, a former exalted Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan, saying he was “one of my mentors” and that “the Senate is a lesser place for his going.”
As early as 1977, Biden said that forced busing to desegregate schools would cause his children to “grow up in a racial jungle.” In 2007, he referred to then-Sen. Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean.”
So many more examples, but not enough space.
Democrats have played the race card for decades, even blaming poor performance (see former Harvard President Claudine Gay) on racism, not plagiarism and a failure to denounce antisemitism on campus. Their talk has been cheap, and the results have been negligible. One wonders why so many still vote for them given their record. White Democrats show up in Black churches only at election time and are then not seen for two or four years. Shouldn’t that tell them something?
White supremacy is a minority view. Christians call it a sin. There are no purebred people. We are all mixed up in the great gene pool of life, as Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. has brilliantly demonstrated in several PBS programs on African American lives. To hate another person because of their race is to hate a part of oneself.
Given the declining poll numbers for Mr. Biden, among especially young Black voters, it would appear they are starting to figure out how Democrats have duped them for decades. Mr. Biden’s out-of-touch speech in Charleston is likely to do little to improve his favorability among their party’s once solid voting bloc.
• Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com. Look for Cal Thomas’ latest book, “A Watchman in the Night: What I’ve Seen Over 50 Years Reporting on America” (HumanixBooks).
