Harwood: Biden's Racially-Insensitive Gaffes 'A Strength'

August 23rd, 2008 9:27 AM

You know the old software programmer's excuse: "that's not a bug.  That's a feature!"  John Harwood of CNBC/NYT has produced a political variation on the theme to buff up Joe Biden.  Biden's gaffes, including the racially-insensitive ones, are actually . . . "a strength."

Harwood was chatting with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski on a special Morning Joe edition today, and the topic of Biden's famous "clean and articulate" comment about Obama arose.  Biden also made headlines of course with his crack about 7-11s being populated by people with Indian accents.

JOHN HARWOOD: He is not somebody who is infused with political correctness, the verbal equivalent of putting his pinky up when he opens his mouth. So this is what, the way ordinary voters are as well. They're not always worried about sort of calibrating every single word by "ooh, is this racially insensitive?"  That's something that Joe Biden brings as an asset to the ticket.  The gaffes actually show one of his strengths.

View video here.

R-i-g-h-h-h-t.  And no doubt Harwood and the rest of the MSM would also celebrate a Republican candidate prone to racially-insensitive comments.  Or not.  And of course we remember how the liberal media found Dan Quayle's gaffes endearing, no?

Joe's just been named, but Harwood's got to be the early clubhouse leader in the Biden Spinning Sweepstakes.

Update 15:44 | Jacob S. Lybbert. Be sure to check out Ace's take. A sample:

Need I remind anyone that for months the left has been DaVinci Codebreaking every John McCain advertisement for so-called "coded racism." And they were not praising such "coded racism" as "refreshing" or charming in the least.

Update 16:01 | Jacob S. Lybbert. At Hot Air, Allah points out that if McCain's racism weren't coded (see above), the MSM wouldn't have given him any guff. Uh huh.

Update 21:38 | Jacob S. Lybbert. Meanwhile, Jeff at Protein Wisdom says that liberals can get away with this type of racism because of the,

animating tenet in “liberal” ideology — namely, that, simply by virtue of adopting the left-liberal agenda, one is good, and so his “mistakes” are but minor slip-ups, hiccups in a life of sublime goodliness.