Sunday, Biden campaign staffers were left wondering who messed with Joe Biden’s teleprompter! For a candidate with a long and growing list of gaffes, surely they would have gotten a wrangler by now that could do their job.
But alas, the Democratic Presidential nominee put his foot in his mouth again.
On the campaign trail, Joe Biden has talked frequently about his early years in the civil rights movement. As a teenager, he says, he regularly attended a black church in Wilmington, Del., where he was involved in organizing anti-segregation protests in the early 1960s.
Lets pause here. Surely Biden has witnessed the unrest in America that has been spurred into riots over “racial” matters. So, logically we would conclude that Biden would make sure he has his facts together before trying to pander to POC.
And that’s where he went wrong.
“I got raised in the black church,” Biden said in a speech to Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH coalition last year. “We would go sit in Rev. Herring’s church, sit there before we’d go out, and try to change things when I was a kid in college and in high school.”
The church Biden referenced, Union Baptist Church, was a prominent African-American church in Wilmington run by Rev. Otis Herring, an acclaimed pastor who passed away in 1996. But Biden has made comments that seem to contradict the account. When reporters questioned Biden’s claim in 1987 that he marched in the civil rights movement, he acknowledged that he “wasn’t an activist” and that his most significant experience with civil rights as a youth was when he worked at a majority-black swimming pool as a college sophomore in 1962.
Now, interviews with long-time church members are raising questions about his story. Biden befriended Herring as an adult, they say, but they do not recall him attending the church as a teenager.
Oops. So just like in 1987, Biden is attempting to gain political advantage on the backs of POC. And just like in 1987, Biden got caught in the lie.
The Biden campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
