“Whether they are exaggerated or not”
By
In the fall of 1988, shortly after Congress had passed the first piece of welfare reform legislation in 50 years, Joe Biden, then a senator from Delaware, wrote a column in his local newspaper that leaned heavily on racial stereotypes in praise of the effort.
“We are all too familiar with the stories of welfare mothers driving luxury cars and leading lifestyles that mirror the rich and famous,” the column read. “Whether they are exaggerated or not, these stories underlie a broad social concern that the welfare system has broken down—that it only parcels out welfare checks and does nothing to help the poor find productive jobs.”
Biden’s argument, delivered in the pages of the Newark Post, was not a full embrace of the rhetoric of conservatives at the time, who warned that the indigent (in their estimation, mainly African-Americans) were using government assistance to supplement lavish lifestyles. But it certainly echoed it, adding to the perception that the problem wasn’t poverty itself but poor people abusing poverty-fighting programs.
“The thing that strikes me about the Biden quote is him acknowledging that it might not be true but then saying that doesn’t matter because perception becomes reality… that people’s attitudes need to be listened to and respected rather than corrected,” said Josh Levin, who wrote a book titled The Queen that traced the roots of the stereotype. Levin added that Biden’s line struck him as atypical of Democrats at the time.
Thirty years later, as Biden finds himself the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for the presidency, both the column and Biden’s broader support for welfare reform could prove politically problematic—serving as another résumé spot, along with his prior praise for segregationist senators and his opposition to busing, that raises concerns about past cultural and racial insensitivities.
“It certainly was a racist narrative,” Adrianne Shropshire, executive director of BlackPAC and the affiliated nonpartisan Black Progressive Action Coalition, said of Biden’s use of the “welfare recipient with a luxury car” imagery. “That was obviously the sort of outrageous and untrue stereotype that emerged certainly during the era of Ronald Reagan, this notion of fraudulent undeserving women… I was a kid. And I remember that being the image—an image that, as a child, I knew was inaccurate.”
This really is Biden’s worldview in a nutshell:
"Whether or not my priors & prejudices have any correlates in reality, they are mine, and I deserve to have them catered to." Basically the Boomer ethos.— David Roberts (@drvox) August 29, 2019
The punchline being that Biden is technically too old to even be a Boomer. I’m beginning to think that making him the Democratic nominee would be a bad idea!