On Tuesday's Anderson Cooper 360, substitute host Soledad O'Brien made the argument that Vice-President Joseph Biden's "chains" gaffe in Danville, Virginia, was "racially coded language," as she rejected the Obama campaign's spin that the comment was not meant to be a reference to the enslavement of African-Americans in the past.
After relating the Obama campaign's explanation, she shot it down:
The point concerns Mr. Biden's choice of metaphor, given where he was and who he was talking to. As we said, he was in Danville, Virginia, the same Danville that was the last capital of the Confederacy, the same Danville that was at the center of major racial unrest during the same Civil Rights summer of 1963, the same Danville CNN's Peter Hambey calls the "heart of the African-American vote in Southern Virginia," the same Danville in a state that's now considered to be a swing state and could very well be key in deciding who wins the presidency.
After bringing aboard CNN contributor Roland Martin and former McCain advisor Ana Navarro to discuss the story further, she opened the segment by posing the question:
When you think about the context, the Vice-President was not talking to a roomful of white people in Iowa, he was talking to a heavily African-American audience in the South with a history -- I was just explaining -- doesn't that, you know, you and I talk about racially coded language all the time. Isn't that clearly racially coded language?
