Biden Calls Obama 'Clean' African-AmericanSlammed For Obama Remarks
By Jake Tapper
Jan. 31 - Senator Joe Biden, D-Del., the loquacious chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who launched his presidential campaign today, may be experiencing an ailment not entirely unknown to him: foot in mouth disease.
Biden is taking some heat for comments he made to the New York Observer, in which he said of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., a rival for the nomination: "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man."
Immediately the conservative media establishment -- Rush Limbaugh, the Drudge Report, bloggers -- publicly pounced. At Townhall.com, Mary Katherine Ham wrote: "A clean black man? The first black guy on the American political scene who can both shower regularly and speak properly? Is that really what Biden thinks? If a Republican had said this, we'd have a national outpouring of grief over the residual ignorance and racial insensitivity in our country, and the guy would be in sensitivity training until around about the time John Kerry is elected president."
Obama Responds
And notably, Obama himself didn't do much to knock the story down.
Asked about the comments at a press conference this afternoon, Obama said, "you'd have to ask Senator Clinton, uh, Senator Biden what he was thinking," initially stumbling by mentioning the name of the Democratic front-runner for the nomination, Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York. "I don't spend too much time worrying about what folks are talking about during a campaign season."
Asked if Biden meant to be complimentary, Obama said, "I'm not going to parse his words that carefully."
In a conference call with reporters about his presidential campaign, Biden acknowledged that he "was quoted accurately" in the New York Observer, but insists his comments are being misunderstood.
"Barack Obama is probably the most exciting candidate that either the Democratic or Republican party has produced at least since I've been around," Biden said. "He's fresh, he's new, he's insightful."
Biden said he regretted that "some have taken totally out of context my use of the word 'clean.'"
"My mother has an expression 'clean as a whistle, sharp as a tack,'" Biden said. "Look, the idea is, this guy is something brand new no one has seen before."
Biden reminded those on the call that he has a long record of support within the African-American community in Delaware and claimed he had spoken with Obama personally about the remark.
According to Biden, Obama told his colleague, "'Joe, you don't have to explain anything to me.'" Biden said he felt Obama "knew what I meant by it."
When asked why, if he feels so strongly about Obama, he is running against him for the Democratic nomination, Biden responded: "I think he's great, I think they're all great. I think I'm better. I think I'm more prepared."
Democratic observers shook their heads at the latest example of how Biden's garrulousness often gets him into trouble.
Biden's campaign insists he is being misunderstood.
"Clean is a synonym for fresh and new," Biden campaign spokesman Larry Rasky told ABC News. "And if you look at the context of the quote it's obvious that's what he meant. And certainly anybody who knows Sen. Biden wouldn't question that."
The Biden campaign also pointed out that on "Good Morning America" today, the senator disputed the notion that Obama is too inexperienced to be president.
"Look, this guy's incredible," Biden said on the program. "He is really bright. He's fresh. He's new. He has great ideas. And the question will be whether or not on the campaign trail he fleshes out his ideas. I think experience does matter, but you'd expect me to say that. But, you know, this also relates to judgment, as he says. And so the folks are going to look at all of us. But he is a real star. This is a really incredible person."
History of Gaffes
This is not the first accusation of racial insensitivity Biden has faced. In June 2006, C-SPAN caught him speaking to an Indian-American man, saying: "In Delaware, the largest growth in population is Indian-Americans moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I'm not joking."
Last November at a Rotary Club meeting in Columbia, S.C., Biden joked about the state's Confederate history, saying that his home state of Delaware was "a slave state that fought beside the North." He added, "that's only because we couldn't figure out how to get to the South, there were a couple of other states in the way."
But Biden has been a consistent liberal voice on civil rights issues. This month he joined an NAACP rally against the presence of the Confederate flag at the South Carolina statehouse, and said, "if I were a state legislator, I'd vote for it to move off the grounds, out of the state."
Biden is occasionally criticized by colleagues for his talkative nature.
Asked if that might hinder his presidential hopes, Rasky earlier told ABC News that "it's a double-edged sword."
"It's chatter for the grist in Washington, D.C., but when you walk into a living room in Cedar Rapids [Iowa], or spend time as he recently did with college students in Manchester [N.H.] and give them a 20-minute answer on Iraq or North Korea, they know the answers to these problems are not simple and they want to be respected. We have seen this repeatedly."
Yes, he does sometimes talk more than is politically correct," Rasky added. "But he always has something meaningful to say."
Biden ran for president 20 years ago and saw his campaign consumed by scandal after senior aides to campaign rival Mike Dukakis, the former governor of Massachusetts, made sure reporters saw that Biden had plagiarized a campaign speech from Neil Kinnock, then the leader of the British Labor Party. Biden had mentioned Kinnock in previous deliveries of that speech, though not in the one distributed to the press.
Other similar revelations news of "borrowing" from speeches by former Democratic icons Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, the story that he'd received a failing grade in a Syracuse Law School course for plagiarizing a legal article, a C-SPAN video of him telling New Hampshire voters that he'd graduated in the "top half" of his law school class (actual standing: 76 out of 85) -- combined to drive him from the race. The Delaware Supreme Court's board on professional responsibility later ruled that Biden had not violated any rules in the law school incident.
On today's conference call, Biden concluded: "I have no doubt that Jesse Jackson and every other black leader -- Al Sharpton and the rest -- will know exactly what I meant. I have a long, long relationship with these folks, they all know what I was saying&(Obama) is a very special guy, this is a guy that's like catching lightning in a jar."
As to whether Biden's penchant for "straight talk" might eventually hurt his campaign, the senator demurred.
"That will be something for the voters to decide," he said. "I don't see it as the problem you apparently see it. The voters will decide that."
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