After a lackluster performance in the first Democratic presidential debate in June, Joe Biden pledged to be more aggressive toward primary rival Kamala Harris when they face off again in a primary debate next week.
“I’m not going to be as polite this time,” Biden told supporters at a fundraiser in Detroit on Wednesday evening, according to a pool report. “Because this is the same person who asked me to come to California and nominate her in her convention.”
The former vice president hinted that he would cash in on his warning from earlier in July that he has “all this information about other people’s pasts.”
“If they want to argue about the past, I can do that,” Biden said at the fundraiser. “I got a past I’m proud of. They got a past that’s not quite so good.”
Harris, a California senator, condemned Biden during the first debate for working with segregationist senators in the 1970s to oppose desegregation busing. Following the debate, Biden suffered a drop in the polls, and he later admitted that he “was not prepared” for Harris’ line of attack.
Earlier on Wednesday, Biden gave a preview of the kind of negative information about his primary rivals that he could bring to the debate stage in Detroit next week.
In a response to New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker’s charge that Biden was an “architect of mass incarceration” when the then-Senate Judiciary Committee chairman sponsored the 1994 crime bill, Biden’s campaign sent out damning details about Booker’s civil rights record from when Booker was mayor of Newark, New Jersey.
“In 2007, as Joe Biden was working to eliminate the crack cocaine-powder cocaine sentencing disparity (partially achieved in 2010 by the Obama-Biden administration), Booker was running a police department that was such a civil rights nightmare that the US Department of Justice intervened,” Biden’s deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield said.
“His police department was stopping and frisking people, mostly African American men,” Biden told reporters on Wednesday.
The move broke Biden’s pledge to not attack Democratic rivals during the presidential campaign.
Biden also criticized Harris, without naming her, for failing to articulate how she would pay for “Medicare for all,” a single-payer healthcare plan that would essentially eliminate private insurance, without raising taxes on the middle class.
“What is this, some fantasy world here?” Biden said.
