He had lots to say about Vice Presiden Biden's recent hateful remarks:
The nation's first elected black governor, Virginia's L. Douglas Wilder, lambasted Vice President Joe Biden on national television Wednesday for his remark to a largely black crowd about banks keeping people "in chains."
Wilder, a Democrat and a grandson of slaves, echoed indignant denunciations from Republicans, including presumptive presidential nominee Mitt Romney, that Biden's comment at a Tuesday rally in Danville, Va., injected race into the presidential contest.
In warning that the Republican ticket would roll back President Barack Obama's regulations reining in banks and investment firms after the 2008 stock market meltdown, Biden said Romney intended to "unchain Wall Street."
Then, Biden added, "they're going to put y'all back in chains."
Romney fired back Wednesday, saying Obama's re-election campaign "is all about division and attack and hatred." Obama's campaign called Romney's response "unhinged."
Wilder, known within his own party for an independent streak that sometimes borders on contrarian, was interviewed separately by Fox News and later CNN.
"Without question they were appeals to race," Wilder told CNN. "And if you don't argue with that, then you understand that, then the next question is why? Why do you feel you need to do that? But the more important thing that I got out of this was Biden separated himself from what he accused the people of doing. As a matter of fact what he said is, they are going to do something to y'all, not to me, not us. So he was still involved with that separate America. And I'm sick and tired of being considered something other than an American."
Wilder also said he doesn't believe Obama would associate himself with, nor make, the remarks that Biden made.
"The president doesn't need this now,' Wilder said. "The president needs to be a part of bringing people together.
Wilder, also a former Richmond mayor, said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would have made a better Obama running mate and called on Biden to "cool it, back up" and admit that he was wrong.
"If Hilary were on that ticket today, based on the job she's done as secretary of state, I think there would be a clearer advantage the president would be seeing," said Wilder, who was elected Virginia's governor in 1989 and briefly ran for president in late 1991. "It's not going to happen. It's too late. I think she'll be getting herself together for 2016."
"What the president needs to do is to disassociate himself from trying to show anybody that division is what this administration is about," Wilder told CNN's Wolf Blitzer.
President Barack Obama dismissed Republican claims that Vice President Joe Biden had a nefarious intent when he said the GOP would "put y'all back in chains" at a campaign stop in Virginia on Tuesday, telling People magazine in an interview that his remarks had to be considered in context.
Rather than being about "division and hate and anger," as Mitt Romney said of Biden's remarks, the president said his running mate was saying only that "you, consumers, the American people, will be a lot worse off if we repeal these (Wall Street reform) laws, as the other side is suggesting."
"In no sense was he trying to connote something other than that," Obama told the magazine during an interview in Iowa, where he has been campaigning.
"The president needs to be a part of bringing people together." Seems he has spent the last three years tearing the country apart. That certainly won't change now. As for the unhinged, we all know who that is. Personally, I believe that God has removed the protective mantle from this sinful nation. We know where Minion #1 is!
Posted by: Patricia | Thursday, August 16, 2012 at 09:52 AM