Shades of Arthur Bremer giving up on assassinating Nixon and deciding to go for George Wallace instead.
On May 4, 1972, after a ten-day break from writing, Bremer realized it would be almost impossible to assassinate Nixon and decided that it was Wallace's "fate" to be his victim, even though his diary entries never showed the same level of interest or enthusiasm as they did with regard to assassinating Nixon. Bremer made this clear in his diary writing, "He [Wallace] certainly won't be buried with the snobs in Washington. ... I won't even rate a TV interruption in Russia or/Europe when the news breaks—they never heard of Wallace."
Kind of amazing to think how recent the Democratic Party's heel-turn away from the Dixiecrats was, and how one of the assholes in their orbit made it to the Vice Presidency and then the Presidency anyway.
I'd love to find Biden's response to the Wallace shooting, but since he wasn't yet a Senator (he'd be elected that year) he may not have had to make a statement. For more on Biden and Wallace, here's a Rolling Stone summary from 2019.
Several paragraphs
On Thursday, another decades-old quote of Biden’s surfaced courtesy of the Trump campaign’s opposition research team. A September 20, 1987, story in the Philadelphia Inquirer reported Biden had bragged about receiving an award from George Wallace, the former Alabama governor and one of America’s most notorious segregationists.
The same story went to quote a presidential primary campaign speech Biden had given in Alabama in which he said “we (Delawareans) were on the South’s side in the Civil War.”
Biden went on to distance himself from Wallace. On Twitter, Biden spokesman Bill Russo shared a 1976 news story quoting Biden saying he would not support Wallace’s presidential bid and would back the Republican candidate if Wallace somehow won the Democratic nomination.
A Biden spokesman tells Rolling Stone in a statement: “As a young Senator, Joe Biden declared that if George Wallace — an unhinged, racist maniac — became the presidential nominee of his party, he would support Gerald Ford. If more GOP leaders had a scintilla of that same courage in 2016, they wouldn’t be debasing themselves this very minute by defending another unhinged, racist maniac.”
Biden’s campaign declined to comment on the candidate saying Delaware sided with the pro-slavery Confederacy during the Civil War.
They don't mention the year but I think the award in question was from 1973.
Shades of Arthur Bremer giving up on assassinating Nixon and deciding to go for George Wallace instead.
Kind of amazing to think how recent the Democratic Party's heel-turn away from the Dixiecrats was, and how one of the assholes in their orbit made it to the Vice Presidency and then the Presidency anyway.
I'd love to find Biden's response to the Wallace shooting, but since he wasn't yet a Senator (he'd be elected that year) he may not have had to make a statement. For more on Biden and Wallace, here's a Rolling Stone summary from 2019.
Several paragraphs
On Thursday, another decades-old quote of Biden’s surfaced courtesy of the Trump campaign’s opposition research team. A September 20, 1987, story in the Philadelphia Inquirer reported Biden had bragged about receiving an award from George Wallace, the former Alabama governor and one of America’s most notorious segregationists.
The same story went to quote a presidential primary campaign speech Biden had given in Alabama in which he said “we (Delawareans) were on the South’s side in the Civil War.”
Biden went on to distance himself from Wallace. On Twitter, Biden spokesman Bill Russo shared a 1976 news story quoting Biden saying he would not support Wallace’s presidential bid and would back the Republican candidate if Wallace somehow won the Democratic nomination.
A Biden spokesman tells Rolling Stone in a statement: “As a young Senator, Joe Biden declared that if George Wallace — an unhinged, racist maniac — became the presidential nominee of his party, he would support Gerald Ford. If more GOP leaders had a scintilla of that same courage in 2016, they wouldn’t be debasing themselves this very minute by defending another unhinged, racist maniac.”
Biden’s campaign declined to comment on the candidate saying Delaware sided with the pro-slavery Confederacy during the Civil War.
They don't mention the year but I think the award in question was from 1973.