The Biden campaign made a blatant appeal to raw emotion this week by invoking the name and memory of former Vice President Joe Biden’s late son Beau, the Daily Caller reported.
The reference to Beau was made in an attempt to fight back against allegations by fellow candidate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) that Joe Biden’s admitted history of collaboration with segregationists and noted opposition to busing in the 1970s make him unsuitable for the White House.
Biden ultimately apologized for remarks in which he touted his amicable relationships with segregationists during his Senate career and said that he had never opposed the concept of busing for school integration purposes, but merely believed that it was not the job of the federal government to mandate it.
Bringing in Beau
The Biden campaign said through an anonymous source on Friday that Joe’s son Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015, would be “flipping in his grave” to see what the Harris campaign said about his father.
The former vice president himself indicated that Beau was a close friend of Sen. Harris, making the the situation all the more hurtful. “I was prepared for them to come after me, but I wasn’t prepared for the person coming at me the way she came at me,” Biden said. “She knew Beau. She knows me.”
Harris is trying to deflate Biden’s early lead and gain the top spot for herself. She had a strong showing in the first set of Democrat debates, knocking 10 points off Biden’s lead. If she can keep that momentum going, she might well become the frontrunner in the near future.
Democrats have morphed into a party in which being a white male is a serious electoral liability, with many believing that proving one’s diversity bona fides requires voting for a woman of color such as Harris instead of an “old white guy” like Biden.
Harris responds
As for Harris, she’s not stymied in the least by Biden’s decision to invoke the name of his son and her friend in the heat of political battle.
She told the Breakfast Club radio show that to her, the subjects of race and Beau Biden are “apples and oranges.”
“He was…a very dear friend to me,” she said about Beau Biden. “That’s separate from the fact that segregationists in the United States Senate stood, and lived their careers, to segregate the races in public education in the United States.”
Joe Biden has pledged not to engage in negative attacks on the other Democrat candidates, but his opponents in the race are showing no such restraint. Undoubtedly, the former vice president finding out how truly difficult it it is to remain positive when everyone else turns negative.
Instead of launching attacks against other candidates, Biden seems to be trying to shame them instead. Thus far, however, that strategy seems to have fallen flat when it comes to Sen. Harris.