Despite describing Republicans in 2012 as anti-black white racists, Vice-President Joe Biden appeared to rebuke Hillary Clinton’s description of wide swathes of President-elect Donald Trump’s supporters – specifically white “working class” men without university degrees – as “deplorables.”
In an interview aired on Sunday’s State of the Union with left-wing CNN Democrat Jake Tapper, Biden reflected on what drove “working class” whites to support Trump. Democrats, he added, “don’t show enough respect” to “working class” whites while failing to appreciate how “globalization” led to “working class” whites being “left behind:”
“We don’t show enough respect to that group that has in fact been left behind. These are people who ad good, decent jobs – my dad used to have an expression, for real, he said, ‘Remember, Joe. A job’s about a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity. It’s about your respect.’ And as much as we’ve come back, there’s still a segment of people who had good decent jobs, five, ten, twelve years ago, and they’re having trouble looking their families in the eye and saying, ‘Honey, it’s going to be okay. I feel certain about where we are, now.’ And we ought to speak to those people. Globalization has not been an unalloyed asset to everybody. Some people have been left behind. There’s ways to deal with that, but we never got a chance to speak to it in this election, and I think we paid a price for it.”
Biden seemed to halt himself from describing Democrats as contemptuous of “working class” whites in more sparsely populated areas of the country:
“There’s a sort of sense that’s grown up in the Democratic Party that somehow these folks are, I mean, these are good people, man. These aren’t racists. These aren’t sexists.”
Tapper attempted to assist Biden in appealing to “working class” whites, claiming that the vice-president is referred to as “middle class Joe” and “lunchbox Joe” (nicknames Biden attributed to himself for political purposes) as evidence of his blue-collar bona fides.
Clinton’s presidential campaign neglected to focus sufficiently on “working class” and “middle class” people, said Biden:
“I don’t think as a party, we spend – look, I’m really proud of what Barack and I, what the president and I were able to do with the economy. But if you notice, the last few years in the president’s state of the union there’s been a shift in focus now that we got the car out of the ditch and on the road and running on really focusing on the real inequities that exist and still exist for working class, middle class people who were left behind. And what happened was, that wasn’t the central part of [Hillary Clinton’s] campaign moving forward, in my opinion.”
Biden then claimed that Clinton’s campaign was victmized by an unfair news media landscape and a uniquely “vicious” campaign from Trump, compromising her ability to appeal to “working class” whites:
“She said it, but she never got a chance to say it. [Hillary Clinton’s policy proposals] got drowned out, it got drowned out by the most vicious campaign, the craziest campaign I’ve ever witnessed in the last, since I’ve been involved.”
Months before the 2012 presidential election, Biden told a mostly black audience that Mitt Romney and Republicans wanted to put them “back in chains.”
Asked about a presidential run in 2020, Biden left the door open:
“Who knows where we’re gonna be two years from now when people really start looking seriously at what they’re gonna do?”
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter.