Joe Biden on the root cause of educational failure - African Americans

Joe Biden did an interview with The Washington Post in 2007. I want to focus on one question in particualar for this posting.

The context was that Iowa spends less money per capita on education than Washington, DC yet outperforms the District. Biden was asked why, in his learned opinion, this was the case. His answer:

"There's less than 1 percent of the population of Iowa that is African American. There is probably less than 4 or 5 percent that are minorities. What is in Washington? So look, it goes back to what you start off with, what you're dealing with.

When you have children coming from dysfunctional homes, when you have children coming from homes where there's no books, where the mother from the time they're born doesn't talk to them — as opposed to the mother in Iowa who's sitting out there and talks to them, the kid starts out with a 300 word larger vocabulary at age three. Half this education gap exists before the kid steps foot in the classroom," "

Now, his staff quickly published a ‘clarification’ to say that he meant that socio-economically disadvantage, instead of African Americans, were the problem.

What is one to make of all of this?

- Joe said, in fact, what he really meant. When you have your staff ‘clarify’ a remark, there are only 2 reasons:
1. You misstated a fact or a number (one Billion vs One Million)
2. You know you stepped in it by saying what you really meant. You now realize it. And you want people to forget what you REALLY meant, and instead focus on what you SHOULD have said.
This is that case of #2. He realized that he stepped it and then tryed to clean it up

- One might make an excuse – but I cannot thing of a good one – as to why he said this. Delaware is 21% African-American vs 13% for the rest of the country. So, he obviously should be tuned into this kind of statement. Maybe he was tired? My experience is that people are truer when tired and worn down – they don’t have the energy to parse their words.

- I can only IMAGINE if a conservative or Republican had said this!! He/she would STILL be apologizing for dissing on an entire race…. But, when you are a Democrat, of course, it is different.

Why do I bring this up? Because Biden has a long history of saying really stupid things. He talks SO much…and goes on for SO long…that the theory of very large numbers (of words)almost guarantees this kind of gaffe.

Stayed tuned to Right of Center Ramblings as we try to pick up this gaffes from the Campaign trail – it should be fun.

Barak Hussein Obama (or as he is known here – BHO) makes it hard to do gaffe-alert. Why? Well, in his speeches, he is oh SO good. And of the cuff, he is oh SO bad. So bad, in fact, that one can hardly tell what the hell he said. You need a crisp sound bite to flag something as a gaffe. When someone rambles, stutters, ummms, wells, ya-knows, etc – it takes the fun out of gaffe collecting.

So, we will focus on Biden. It will not be big on substance - but it should be fun.