It’s a critical period in the election. With less than 90 days to go, both sides are revving up their advertising and messaging machines, readying their ground forces, and preparing for the last big push that begins after Labor Day.
So this is not the time for either candidate to commit a serious gaffe. But Joe Biden did just that on Thursday, contrasting the “diversity” of the black and Latino communities.
In the full interview, broadcast Thursday, Biden contrasted the Black and Latino communities, saying “unlike the African American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community with incredibly different attitudes about different things.”
.@JoeBiden: “Unlike the African-American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community" pic.twitter.com/CFO4Q40jEI
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) August 6, 2020
Well, gee…isn’t that sorta like stereotyping or something? It certainly plays into the Democratic “plantation” theme that blacks have a monolithic political viewpoint that’s rigorously enforced by the elites.
The gaffe got huge play on the internet. But after an initial acknowledgement of the gaffe on Friday morning, MSNBC was AWOL on the issue.
While MSNBC covered Biden’s mea culpa addressing his racially charged remarks on Friday morning, its biggest stars continued their blackout of coverage on the network’s most-watched shows.
None of the collective nine hours worth of programming — from hosts Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes and Ali Velshi, who was filling in this week for Lawrence O’Donnell — addressed the former VP’s rhetorical flubs.
That was an editorial decision probably coming from the highest authority. Political junkies could talk about little else and yet, the network failed to cover the story at all. That speaks to a corporate decision not to touch the issue.
CNN wasn’t much better.
CNN’s first primetime mention of Biden’s gaffes came Friday night on “Cuomo Prime Time.” However, CNN anchor Chris Cuomo strangely did not play the actual clip from Biden’s interview from the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ).
Instead, Cuomo read Biden’s comments — about what the former vice president viewed as a lack of “diversity” in the African American community — out loud to discuss with his guest.
But Biden couldn’t leave it alone and he subsequently forced the media to pay attention to his racial theories by doubling down. Instead of keeping silent and answering every question about it by saying “I’ve already answered that,” he tried to whitesplain what he meant.
“Now what I mean [by] full diversity [is] unlike the African American community and many other communities, you’re from everywhere,” Biden explained. “You’re from Europe, from the tip of South America, all the way to our border in Mexico, and the Caribbean. And [of] different backgrounds, different ethnicities, but all Latinos. We’re gonna get a chance to do that if we win in November.”
Um… get a chance to do exactly what? Take a tour of North and South America?
It was a difficult gaffe to explain or defend but CNN’s John King gave it the old college try. He wondered whether the president was right to call the remarks “insulting.”
“He’s trying to make the point, and maybe he didn’t make it articulately as he would have liked, [but] I believe the point he was trying to make is that most African Americans overwhelmingly support Democrats, and if you go around the country — you go to Florida, for example, you have the Cuban American population, or you might have a Puerto Rican population that has moved to Florida that has a different view than, let’s say, a Latino in Nevada or Arizona,” King elaborated.
So Biden’s gurgling incoherence is completely excusable. Now, this is what he was really trying to say…
For the media to cover a major Biden gaffe from here on out, he’s going to have to have a blow-up during the debates. Only when 50 million other people are watching will much of the media reluctantly force itself to try and explain what the incomprehensible former vice president is saying.
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