COLUMBIA, S.C. — Jesse Jackson argued former Vice President Joe Biden comments about working with segregationists while serving in the Senate cannot be compared to President Trump’s race rhetoric.
“Joe made… He expressed a truth unartfully,” Jackson told the Washington Examiner on the sidelines of the South Carolina Democratic Party convention. “He didn’t say it well, he used a bad example. But you can’t compare what Joe said with Trump — birther movement, Charlottesville, calling Africa s-hole. You can’t compare that unartful expression with that ideological commitment by Trump.”
Jackson, a racial activist who hails from the Palmetto State, acknowledged that black voters in the early-nominating state take racial insensitivity “seriously,” but urged them to put Biden’s remarks “in perspective” with what “the goal is.”
“Trump has trounced our progress. He’s put judges in what will send us back with how they rule,” the 77-year-old civil rights activist and former two-time presidential candidate said. “Tax cuts for the wealthy and health cuts for the poor. That’s not sustainable. That’s the bigger picture.”
Jackson declined to endorse any of the two dozen White House hopefuls making their pitch to South Carolina Democrats this weekend, suggesting “it’s a bit premature.”
“I think the pace has been set now, there are some general things,” he said. “They all have agreed on raising living wages, they all agree on affordable healthcare, they all agree on spending more on education and less on jails, they all agree on that. So it seems to me that whoever wins must win on some substantive basis, and not ideological split, frankly.”
The former shadow senator for D.C. added he believes the South is fertile ground for Democrats in future election cycles given the number of unregistered black voters, despite Republicans’ traditional stranglehold on the region.
“I’m excited frankly to see the new South emerging,” he said. “You have an old South of marginalization. To see the multicultural, multiracial South on the rise is good for America. The South must make a fundamental move, one to maintain its trajectory, and moving racial and gender battlegrounds so they become common ground.”
Biden, who is running for president for the third time, resisted calls to apologize for citing during a New York fundraiser two noted Democratic segregationists, former Sens. James O. Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia, as instances of lawmakers with whom he collaborated as Delaware’s representative in the Senate. Eastland and Talmadge, who are both dead, were known for pushing racist policies and considering black people to be inferior.
