Biden doesn't see tea party as a racist group

WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Joe Biden says the tea party movement is conservative and has very different ideas about government, but it's not a racist organization.

Biden tells ABC's "This Week" that some people who've participated in tea party events or who've been on the periphery of these events have made "really unfortunate comments."

But he says that he and President Barack Obama don't think the tea party is racist.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100718/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_biden_tea_party



Thoughts?

Edit to include link to original story

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What if Biden had called them filthy racists on TV? What then? What do you think the story would be for the next three weeks?

Biden comes from a blue-collar, Catholic background. He understands better than most the nature of the quasi-populist conservative crowd; he speaks and understands their language.

Many, many DUers come from an isolated world, where everyone in their circle is left of center, and it is easy to caricature opponents. Thankfully, Biden and Obama have a broader set of life experiences.

Biden is right. There are racists in the tea party movement, more than in the public at large, but that doesn't make every tea party member a racist.

My Father in Law who's been to 5 east coast tea parties thinks that racists are buffoons. We argue about politics constantly but he's a good, fair-minded person. I asked him one time whether he thought most of his fellow tea party-ers (okay, I may have said "baggers") were racists and he replied by asking how many racists do I know that go jumping for joy when a black joins their group. Then he added, "WE do that!"

Hard to reconcile that kind of sentiment with anti-blackness.

And so ends my very first post on Democratic Underground. Where's the restroom?

Is he that clueless inside the Beltway bubble?

IMO. :eyes: :eyes: :eyes:

:dem:

Even if the fringe is making poor choices and the main does nothing to stop it then they are in fact condoning the practice.

It it is not just a random act but it happens all the time.

I remember the Nazi sign at the outdoor rally held at the Capital hosted by bachmann and the republican leaders did not voice their objection to the signs then they are racist also.

...which is a damn shame.

Anyone who doesn't have their head completely up their own ass knows that the teabaggers at the very least have some "unfortunate" associations, but for some reason, politicians are actually intimidated by these loons.

I don't know why Biden cares, it's not like the teabaggers are his constituency anyway.

It's not like the Tea Party likes him or anything. LOL

It stinks.

He just put it right back in the teabaggers laps. They have made their reputation, let them clean it up.

A fumble by Joe.

Can you see the headlines if he had said they're racists? It would immediately fall on reverse racism and the Obama adm. Joe Biden is no fool, and to sit there as VP and make that kind of accusation would be foolish. He did though acknowledge that:

"some people who've participated in tea party events or who've been on the periphery of these events have made "really unfortunate comments."

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jMfZhUOzaGCLGDEK7BbJKNA6IGsAD9H1I4H00


He handed it right back to the tea party and he was correct in doing so.

The opposition wants him to say the Tea Party is racist. He is not going to do that.

Keep the focus where it should be.

Since when is the truth not politically smart?

But I would like to create a .gif of all of the hate signs made by the teabaggers that were photographed at their rallies and email them to Biden, along with an attachment of a large sample of the thousands of racist topics and replies that I have read that were posted on RW forums about President Obama AND his wife Michelle.

The Tea Party leaders may claim that they are not racist, but most of their members certainly are!!

:bounce:

I understand why Democrats are painting them as a whole as racists (especially since there are such good examples from a small number of them), but as a whole they are not a racist movement/organization. Calling the Tea Party folks racist is a way to marginalize them -- just like calling them tea baggers.

We can beat the Tea Party folks with better arguments, ideas, plans, and results. We don't need to race bait.

by calling them racists is easier than making your argument and then listening to the counterargument...

I have no time for people who don't even have two brain cells that arc

vote counts just as much as your's or mine does.

;) J/K

they don't hide it. Dehumanizing them? They are doing the dehumanizing.

The ones you know are *racists.

But I think it might be fair to say that you don't know all the teabaggers, all over the country.

I would be willing to bet that a good number of them are NOT racist.




* I placed an asterisk before the term "racist" because it seems to be a very subjective term here at DU. Just like a lot of RW nuts tend to see porn and religious persecution in every dark corner, many DUers seem to have the same problem with seeing "racism" in places where it likely doesn't even exist.

those in the rest of the country.

ridiculous as "Obama is a lying socialist, Nazi, Kenyan?"

You act as though they have some merit. They do not. They're just a bunch of racist pigs who are pissed because their white skin doesn't guarantee that they can look down their nose at black and brown people anymore.

I have no idea why people insist on pretending these racist assholes actually have a political point to prove. They have none. Their arguments are nonsensical clap trap which only makes sense when you realize that they're useful idiots for people like Dick Armey and his clients.

They are racist and ought to be called out on it every god-damned day. Pretending they are not only legitimizes these tea-bagger clowns.

what the term currently means in slang)??

If I recall correctly.

the last surviving confederate widow chimes in to support the tea-baggers.

Racists come in every shape, color, nationality and religion.

The topic of my reply is your repeated denial of obvious racism in the tea-bagger movement. It fits into an unsavory pattern in your posting history.

that much interest in the tea party. At least it puts me in good company with Biden. Thanks for being interested in my posting history. Wish I had the time to be interested in your posting history.

under GWB. (Obama and Joe can't say it, but I will.)

I think because they are moderately right of center is more realistic reason for their sudden appearance after Obama's election.

They try to paint themselves as neutral defenders of the constitution, but they're just Republicans with a difference mask on.

Bush was a big spender, they didn't care--what they care about is the "Lyin' African". And I know some of these people personally, they often mistake me and my husband for "one of them" because my husband is a military officer...they reveal the racism pretty quickly in casual conversation and little asides.

To each his own, but there are those further on out there on the right wing that bother me than teabaggers. Teabaggers are weekend warriors.

While their purpose isn't as a racist group, they are a group of reactionaries made up in a large part by bigots.

What a lot of people don't realize is that Generation Suck never stopped crying about the Civil Rights Act forcing white males to compete with people of color and women. Mediocre white males were assured of a good living until that happened, they think, not realizing that liberals went out of power shortly afterward and that's what destroyed their good living, not allowing everybody else to the more lucrative parts of the job market.

So, Joe, none of their shrieking is overtly anti Civil Rights Act, but that's really where they're all coming from. They blame it for everything, especially for the economic disaster that befell them when liberals went out of power and the New Deal was dismantled.

and asked him what he REALLY thought, you'd get a very different answer.

But Biden knew the cameras were on and he knew the media whores were waiting for him to say something they could puff up into a story.

racism. They're letting others do that - the Pres & VP have to stay "above" that. Politics, ya know. :eyes:

They are their own worst enemy.

Nothing would probably make the teapers happier than to have the VP as a target for their victimization of themselves.

sideshow?

Oh yeah they are just regular folk :eyes:

of giving them ammunition for their racism. And neither is Obama.

Why take them seriously? It just gives them more puffage.

...and the other headline would've been "Biden calls tea partiers racists."

think they're willing to cause unrest by labeling the baggers as racist. As always, they have to look at the larger picture.

"The Tea Party and the N.A.A.C.P. represent disproportionately older memberships. And herein lies a problem with so much of our discussion about race and politics in the Obama era: we tend not to recognize the generational divide that underlies it."

But the insidious presence of racism within some quarters of the movement — or, maybe more accurately in some cases, an utter indifference toward racial sensitivities — shouldn’t really surprise anyone. That’s not necessarily because a subset of these antigovernment ideologues are racist, per se, but in part because they are just plain old — at least relatively speaking. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center in June, 34 percent of Americans between the ages of 50 and 64 — and 29 percent of voters 65 and older — say they agree with the movement’s philosophy; among Americans 49 and younger, that percentage drops precipitously. A New York Times/CBS News poll in April found that fully three-quarters of self-identified Tea Party advocates were older than 45, and 29 percent were older than 64.

This does not mean that there aren’t hateful 25-year-olds coming to Tea Party rallies and letting fly racial slurs. What it does mean is that a sizable percentage of the Tea Party types were born into a segregated America, many of them in the South or in the new working-class suburbs of the North, and lived through the marches and riots that punctuated the cultural and political upheaval of the 1960s. Their racial attitudes, like their philosophies of governance, reflect their complicated journeys. (This is true for a lot of older, urban Democrats, too, who consider themselves liberal but whose racial commentary causes their grandchildren to recoil.)

In other words, we are living at an unusual moment when the rate of progress has been dizzying from one generation to the next, such that Americans older than 60, say, are rooted in a radically different sense of society from those younger than 40. And this generational tension — perhaps even more than race or wealth or demography — tends to fracture our politics.

These numbers probably do reflect some profound racial differences among the generations, but they are more indicative of how young and old Americans approach the issues of the day, generally. Older Americans now — no longer the New Deal generation, but the generation that remembers Vietnam, gas lines and court-ordered busing — are less enamored of expansive government than their parents were. They fear changes to their entitlement programs, even as they denounce the explosion in federal spending. They are less optimistic about the high-tech economy, more fearful of the impact of immigration and free trade.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/us/politics/18bai.html?ref=us

then and stayed that way IMO. So, there are a fair number of us old farts out here that are about as far from a teabagger as one can get.

lives in a bubble, so out of touch... on the flip side, he said the politically correct thing trying to keep the herd in tact.

some racist replies...heh!!

For example:

"For a liberal to say that the Tea Party is not racist - is racist!"

huh?!?

:freak:

Biden is handling this well. shh... Tea baggers can keep the emails and events coming. It's easier to rid yourself of vermin when it's out from under the rocks.

I'm saving their filthy emails (including the return paths) for a time their senders might run for local office or accept appointments and hope other people do it for their local areas too. I've been shocked at the people who have sent this trash to me, not just because of who they are but that they seem clueless about my longstanding political affiliation. It's very apparent they are politically ignorant/inexperienced and that makes them a perfect tea bagger candidate.

Mostly because what's the alternative? "Oh, yeah, those fucks are racist wastes of oxygen."

Then the story becomes about Biden's comments, not the teabaggers' racism.

Dear Mr. Biden,

If you believe the tea partiers are not racist, I have the following items for sale that I would like to sell you;

and that would be beyond ridiculous. It would give the teabaggers a status they currently do not and should not have.

Biden was very wise in his response, imo.

:thumbsup:

It's groups of pissed-off people scattered across the country. They have no national leadership. they have no formal organization. they're just people who have adopted that label to be identified as 'angry'.

some are genuine nutjob racists.

but some are people who have been hurting, and are so blind with rage that they can't see through the BS.

There are plenty of racists out there and some of them are probably out at what might be considered Tea Party rallies, but someone please explain just what the Tea Party is?

Where are their offices? Who is their spokesperson? Who is their leader? What is their organizational format? In what states are they registered as a Party?


There are a bunch of noise makers, but there ain't no Tea Party.

and the GOP has a field-day with it, along with the MSM who'll use the opportunity to create a new scandal it can report on for days, if not weeks & months.

No, Joe was smart in not handing them ammunition like that.

dg

I'm sure he knows better.

The dem leadership STILL has unrealistic hopes that some republicans can & will be swayed to see things our way :grr:

You don't defeat your political enemies by demonizing them.

He's smart enough to know that if he starts labelling the tea party as racist, he will chase away the whites who elected him and Barack Obama to have a post-racial society. You have to persuade people along slowly towards your point of view, you cannot drag them there at once.

In overwhelming numbers.

Joe's kind of splitting hairs but unlike the KKK, the thrust of the tea party is not racism.

invade Iraq" "Liz Fowler's giveaway is a big fucking deal" (shallow readers swoon over this) "the usurers and MBNA has your best interests at heart"

it's not that he's "prone to put his foot in his mouth": that's a shallow analysis that focuses on vocabulary rather than substance; it's not even that he's stupid: it's that he (like a good many, perhaps even the majority of, Dems) is a corporate instrument

this may be a stretch, but corpoDems would rather deal with Klansmen than progressives, peacemongers, or nature-loving scientists; they LIKE to warmonger or sell Main Street out to Wall Street. the harder they sell out, the more aggressive their defenders will get across the board. by October the lazy thinking of "they're the only good party"--party loyalty--will be at a fever pitch, but probably won't affect the elections either way. they will, however, certainly play up the GOP candidates' (genuine) craziness to make sellout and BOHICA candidates look wonderful by comparison (e.g., Reid vs. Angle).

ignoring and enabling racists in their ranks many of them are for states rights. I also seriously doubt many of them support affirmative action. If you're supporting policies that have a disparate impact on minorities you're being racist. Racist humor and slurs are not required, although the Tea Party have done those enough to remove any doubt that they have a strong racist element in their midst.

It's indeed possible Biden is concerned about alienating moderate whites. Some of them may believe the Tea Party is largely harmless.

I'll always be grateful he managed to demote Joe Biden from full-time Senator to President of the Senate.

and that the position of VP doesn't have as much weight as full time senator.

Edit to add:

If you have an employee that you can't fire but want to put them in a position to do less damage, promote them to assistant manager...

other than ably represent his constituents for 30+ years.

Go ahead. I'll wait.

I was clarifying what I imagined the person you asked what they meant said...

Now that we all know we're confused and overreacting, I suppose we should stop calling them racists.
Anything that may look like racism is clearly a figment of our overactive minority imaginations.

At least he'd be speaking on his own behalf, instead of deciding they aren't racist on everyone else's behalf.

When African American groups demand a movement stop being racist, and a white guy (Especially one that is pushed as a liberal on MSM) gets on TV and says "They're not racist.", it makes the AA group look like silly reactionaries that don't know what they're talking about and are bitching for the sake of bitching. Which would be fine if they were just being reactionary. They're not, though. Teabagger racism has been documented over and over and over.

Now the talking point from the right will be that even the socialist liberal VP thinks they aren't racist, so clearly they aren't. The NAACP are just touchy and "playing the race card" again.

Even though many of the teabaggers would just as soon see his head on a stick, along with every single minority and "lazy" socialist liberal living (or better still, dying) in the US.

"Take OUR country back" does not mean that the more violence-prone, insurrection-ready, and whackjob-crazy amongst the teabaggers are going to simply just wait out a possible two-term Democratic "usurper" POTUS, or ask the government to give it back pretty please politely, even though "our country" should belong to ALL Americans.

it's NOT everyone in the party - it's the fringe.

Your subject line is very misleading.