Republished from Black Agenda Report
Older Black voters appear to buy into the idea of Biden's "electability," a farce engineered by Democratic elites that is likely to give us four more years of Trump.
"Biden's popularity among Black voters is a hangover from the blind and unconditional support those same voters gave to the Obama administration."
No readily available poll confirms that Barack Obama is currently the most popular politician in the US, but last week CNN's Chris Cillizza declared that he is "by a long shot" and that he'd been a big winner in the debate because every candidate on stage invoked his alleged accomplishments at one point or another. It's quite likely true,given that the former president has all the grace that Trump lacks and remains hugely popular in Black America. According to late BAR Editor Bruce Dixon, this is true even among Black Americans who lost their homes to the banks that Obama bailed out.
No presidential hopeful has been more desperately grasping at Obama's coattails than his former vice president Joe Biden. This year, which turned out to be Bruce Dixon's last, he wrote several essays intended to dispel Black voters' trust in Biden simply because he was Obama's vice president. They included "Black Voters Are Biden's Polling Balloon. We Need to Bust It," published in May 2019, after Biden emerged at the top of the polls. "The obvious conclusion," he wrote, "supported by the fact that Biden's first two campaign videos are race themed, and the second one prominently includes Barack Obama, is that Biden's popularity among Black voters is a hangover from the blind and unconditional support those same voters gave to the Obama administration."
"Obama remains hugely popular even among Black Americans who lost their homes to the banks that he bailed out."
Although he had no praise for Obama, Bruce wrote that Biden had his own record to account for:
"Biden was Obama's vice president. But Biden is not Obama. Even if Obama openly endorses him at some point, Biden has his own record, and it's that of a consistent corporate stooge, particularly of the real estate and banking industries, and as one of the architects of the mass incarceration state.
"Joe Biden didn't just cast a vote for the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act , also known as the Clinton Crime bill. Joe Biden wrote the bill, including but not limited to provisions that created
* no less than 60 new federal death penalty offenses
* a ban on Pell grants for prisoners, from which states took their cues and enacted similar bans on higher education for prisoners.
* $9 billion in new funding for prisons
* sex offender registries to ensure lifelong stigmatization of the convicted
* 3 strikes provisions
* new funding for 'boot camps' and juvenile prisons
* funding for 100,000 new police officers
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