Via Boston Globe:
Last week, at a convention for Black and Hispanic journalists, a Black reporter asked Joe Biden whether he has taken a cognitive test.
This was Biden’s response: “No, I haven’t taken a test. Why the hell would I take a test? Come on, man! That’s like saying you, before you got in this program, you’re taking a test whether you’re taking cocaine or not. What do you think, huh? Are you a junkie?”
Had that answer come from President Trump it would have been blasted, virtually nonstop, as blatantly racist. But the Biden campaign was basically allowed to brush off the query as “preposterous” rather than address the appropriateness of the words spoken by Trump’s Democratic challenger. Besides the matter of relatively low-key media coverage of Biden’s over-wrought objections to a perfectly valid question posed to a 77-year-old presidential candidate, it raises another serious political issue: How many more insults will Black voters take from Biden in the interest of defeating Trump? And at this point, wouldn’t a failure to select a Black woman as his running mate be the ultimate insult? Biden’s credibility as Barack Obama’s friend and vice president can go only so far.