As I blogged yesterday, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del) is running for president. He'll provide a few laughs, but the jokes of course will be at his expense.
Biden may be the first man since the late Strom Thurmond to take pride in fact that he comes from a former slave state.
From a Kathleen Parker column last month:
Biden is but the most recent in a long line of pretenders to grits, but he may be the first to invoke slavery for political points.
His first reference came during an interview last summer with Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday." Wallace asked Biden how a "Northeastern liberal" could compete in conservative Southern states against someone like former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner -- at the time a possible contender.
Biden replied: "My state was a slave state. My state is a border state. My state has the eighth-largest black population in the country." Well, yee-haw!
More...
Delaware was a "slave state that fought beside the North," he said. "That's only because we couldn't figure out how to get to the South. There were a couple of states in the way."
Population-wise, most of Delaware is part of the Philadelphia sprawl--really southern.
According to Wikipedia, in the 1860 census when Delaware's population was 90,000, there were 20,000 free blacks and just 1,800 slaves. Of course that's 1,800 too many. The largest slaveholder at that time--the Gerald O'Hara of Delaware--owned 16 slaves.
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