Joe Biden’s late son Beau, who served as Delaware attorney general, is a focal point of the former vice president’s life story as he seeks the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
The former vice president evoked Beau after one of his chief Democratic rivals, Kamala Harris, highlighted his opposition to desegregation busing during the fist Democratic primary debate. But Harris isn’t letting up on her criticism.
Harris, elected to the Senate in 2016, previously served six years as California attorney general. That overlapped with Beau Biden’s tenure as Delaware’s top prosecutor, and the pair knew each other professionally. In an interview on The Breakfast Club morning show aired Friday, Harris spoke fondly of Beau Biden before pivoting to familiar political terrain, hitting his father for talking up his work with segregationist senators in the 1970s.
The California senator and Democratic presidential hopeful said her relationship with Beau Biden is “separate from the fact that segregationists in the United States Senate stood and lived their careers to segregate the races in public education in the United States, and that I was one of those many children who was personally impacted by that.”
Harris added, “I’m not gonna let us engage on a debate stage for who’s gonna be the next president of the United States, I’m not gonna allow us to engage in revisionist history.”
Harris’ attack on Biden along those lines at the June 27 Democratic presidential primary debate caught the former vice president off guard. Biden later admitted he “wasn’t prepared” for the Harris attack.
“I was prepared for them to come after me, but I wasn’t prepared for the person coming at me the way she came at me,” Biden said, adding that Harris knew his late son. “She knew Beau, she knows me.”
Beau Biden died in May 2015 after a battle with brain cancer. The former vice president cited his son’s death as one reason why he decided not to seek the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.
“I’m not going to allow us to engage in revisionist history” – Sen. #KamalaHarris takes aim at #JoeBiden and why she came at him during the debates. pic.twitter.com/z31Qtdgntv
— The Breakfast Club (@breakfastclubam) July 12, 2019
The Breakfast Club host DJ Envy said that “it felt like [Biden] was looking for sympathy” when he mentioned Beau.
Harris called Beau Biden an “incredible human being and a very dear friend to me.”
“When I was battling the big banks, Beau stood with me. He was the attorney general of Delaware at the time,” Harris said. “Beau and his father have a very special, special relationship, and through Beau I got to know his father mostly just because of the love that they shared for each other.”
In a speech in Sumter, South Carolina, last weekend following 17 days of criticism from primary rivals and a drop in the polls, Biden apologized for “any of the pain or misconception” that arose from him pointing to his relationships with segregationist Sens. James O. Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia as an example of civility.
Biden did not, however, specifically apologize for working with those senators in the Senate or his votes opposing federally mandated busing. “I chose to work within the system, to make it better, to get things done for the least among us. Was I wrong to do that? I don’t think so,” Biden said.
Harris also said her position is not the same as Biden’s on busing and that she would have supported federally mandated busing in the 1970s.
“We cannot rewrite history on this, and that was part of the reason I raised it on that stage,” Harris said. “America’s history on this issues is that there had to be busing because there were people like those segregationists who served in the United States Senate, who served in the Congress, who served in statehouses, who were using every breath they had to fight against integration of the public schools of America.”
