Reverend William Avon Keen is defending Biden. Danville is the Virginia pastor who introduced Vice President Joe Biden before Biden told the largely black audience that Republicans are “gonna put y’all back in chains.”
Keen, who is black, is the president of the state’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He said:
He was giving the African American community and the poor people a warning that if we’re not careful and do no vote properly what could happen. That these chains could be placed back on us that President Obama had lifted off us by the bailouts and saving GM.
Biden’s comments have been denounced by Artur Davis, who used to be an Alabama Democrat before becoming a Northern Virginia Republican. Davis, on CNN’s “The Situation Room,” told Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday that what Biden said on Wednesday was something he has seen many a time in the South.
“It was wrong, and the president ought to be embarrassed by it, and the president ought to say it was wrong,” Davis told Blitzer.
Former Virginia Gov. Doug Wilder, the first black governor elected in any American state after Reconstruction, also denounced Biden’s comments.
“First of all, without question they were appeals to race,” Wilder said Wednesday on CNN. “The important thing I got out of this was Biden separated himself from what he accused the people of doing. As a matter of fact, what he said is they are going to do something to y’all, not to me. Not us. So he was still involved with that separate American.”
Wilder continued: “As far as I am concerned, the President would not associate himself with those remarks … And I expect as the days go forward there will be more clarity associated with what the president feels about what Joe Biden said.”
Except even Obama defended Biden’s remarks during an interview with Nancy O’Dell on “Entertainment Tonight” on Wednesday.
Democrats, liberals, and black leaders are often the first too see race when there usually isn’t, especially if “offending” party is on the right side of the political aisle.
Yet, after Biden’s remarks, many black leaders, including President Barack Obama, have shown that Democratic partisan politics now trumps principle.
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