More Joe Biden racial views

[JackWhite]

Democratic Senator and Presidential candidate Joe Biden has made some interesting remarks lately on racial/ethnic issues. In a Washington Post interview today, he commented on why test scores for students in Iowa are higher than in Washington D.C. The reason according to Biden: "There's less than 1 percent of the population of Iowa that is African American. There is probably less than 4 or 5 percent that are minorities. What is in Washington? So look, it goes back to what you start off with, what you're dealing with."

Is Biden saying that areas with white students are just naturally going to have higher test scores than areas with a lot of minorities? Apparently his staff realized that this sounded bad. After the interview, they released a statement trying to explain that Senator Biden was not really referring to race as an issue in the test scores.

Earlier in the campaign Biden commented on Senator Obama. He was so impressed with a black candidate who was "clean and articulate."

Earlier this year he made a remark about not being able to "go into a 7-11 or Dunkin Donuts without an Indian accent."

Do I think Joe Biden is a racist? No. I think he simply has had a bad habit of using a poor choice of words. Considering others in public life have faced serious negative consequences for a poor choice of words, I wonder if this will ever catch up to Biden? Or will he generally always get the benefit of the doubt.