On the menu today: The news isn’t really that Jill Biden made a series of cringe-inducing comparisons about America’s Latino communities in her speech, the news is that groups such as the National Association of Hispanic Journalists concluded they couldn’t just avert their eyes and give her a pass this time.
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Jill Biden’s Tone-Deaf Speech
Let’s begin with an assessment that I suspect many readers will find too generous: First Lady Jill Biden has no discernible animosity, ill will, or hatred toward Latinos.
What Jill Biden does have is a certain tone-deafness and presumptuousness toward them — and likely toward lots of other people — along with far too much confidence that every word that drips from her lips is a gift on par with manna from heaven. This is a trait she shares with her husband.
Jill Biden’s prepared remarks at the 2022 UnidosUS Annual Conference in San Antonio on Monday included this paragraph: “Raul [Yzaguirre] helped build this organization with the understanding that the diversity of this community — as distinct as the bodegas of the Bronx, as beautiful as the blossoms of Miami, and as unique as the breakfast tacos here in San Antonio — is your strength.”
Except she pronounced “bodegas” as “bogodas.” Bodegas, blossoms, and breakfast tacos are all rather clichéd examples of American Latino culture; I suppose we should be thankful she didn’t add, “and as fast as Speedy Gonzalez.” Beyond that, the metaphor doesn’t really work; go order two of the same kind of breakfast tacos from the same restaurant and see how unique they are. If she had declared, “The Scandinavian-Americans of Minnesota are as unique as pancakes,” everyone would have instantly seen the problem with the comparison. It would have been bad enough if she said it off the cuff, but this was part of Biden’s prepared remarks, meaning it had been written, and approved, by an allegedly professional speechwriter.
The National Association of Hispanic Journalists couldn’t hold their tongue at the cringe-inducing comparison. “NAHJ encourages [the First Lady] and her communications team to take time to better understand the complexities of our people and communities. We are not tacos. Our heritage as Latinos is shaped by various diasporas, cultures and food traditions. Do not reduce us to stereotypes.”
Republicans are starting to win larger and larger shares of Latino voters, and Democrats are in a well-justified panic about the upcoming midterm elections. Joe Biden’s job-approval rating with everyone is abysmal, but in yesterday’s New York Times/Siena poll, just 12 percent of self-identified Latino voters said they “strongly approved” of the job Biden was doing. No doubt the subtext of the First Lady’s appearance yesterday was to remind Latinos why they’re supposed to prefer Democratic candidates.
Elected Democrats, or Democratic proxies such as Jill Biden, usually get a lot of slack when it comes to cringe-inducing statements about race. Jill’s husband may well be the most notorious example: “You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking”; “[Obama is the] first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”; “gonna put y’all back in chains; “these Shylocks”; “Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids”; “Unlike the African-American community with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community”; “Are you a junkie?” and so on.
Elderly white Democrats walk around believing that everyone recognizes them as one of the good guys, one of the enlightened ones, and thus they’re entitled to speak more bluntly and directly about race than the typical white person. They can’t be racist, insensitive, or abrasive; check their voter registration!
“If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black,” Biden infamously told radio DJ Charlamagne tha God on The Breakfast Club in May 2020.
Biden, the six-term senator and two-term vice president who was born in 1942, felt comfortable asserting that someone else isn’t authentically black based upon their voting record. The term “white privilege” gets thrown around a lot, but it’s hard to imagine a more glaring example of an entitled viewpoint that dictating to other minority groups what makes them genuine members of their racial group or culture — whether that measuring stick is voting for Biden or using the term “LatinX.” Who the hell is Joe Biden to run around proclaiming what makes someone black?
There was a time, not that long ago, when the National Association of Hispanic Journalists would have chalked up Jill Biden’s ill-considered comments as the harmless verbal flourish of a 71-year-old woman who grew up in the ’50s and ’60s in white neighborhoods in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The group would have averted its eyes and not issued a statement; no need to build up friction with someone who, on paper, is an ally.
Clearly, the NAHJ is exasperated from always being expected to play along and just pretend they didn’t hear what they just heard.
I think Charlie Cooke is right; Democrats are just tired of Joe Biden and of having to explain away his poor performance. Since Biden was elected, the only thing that has gone right is that the Covid-19 pandemic effectively ended and the unemployment rate has remained low. Inflation is out of control, gas prices are at record highs, grocery bills are skyrocketing, the stock market is getting battered and people’s 401(k)s are shrinking, crime remains high, mass shootings keep bedeviling America’s public spaces, Russia’s invading Ukraine, there’s a global food and commodity crisis, and the Taliban is running Afghanistan and oppressing women again. Democrats are apoplectic that the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, a New York State gun law, and the EPA’s right to regulate carbon emissions without explicit approval from Congress. Parents are up in arms, the teachers’ unions look like callous fools who kept schools closed and harmed a generation of schoolchildren, and “abolish the police” looks like a suicidal public policy. Republicans notice that waves of illegal immigrants headed north shortly after Biden’s inauguration and haven’t stopped coming since.
That New York Times poll found that 64 percent of Democrats want a different presidential nominee in 2024. Nobody’s willing to cover for this guy anymore; no one is inclined to avert their eyes when Biden or his wife blurts out something tone-deaf now.
There are some of us who would argue that Joe Biden has always been an insecure, abrasive, presumptuous, disingenuous, demagogic, insufferable blowhard who was largely protected by a cozy, all-too-friendly relationship with a press inclined to airbrush his glaring character faults, presenting him as a wacky neighbor or a kindly, ice-cream loving grandpa.
What we see now is what happens when much of the national media, the Democratic Party establishment, and liberal interest groups stop playing along with the narrative that Biden is a wiser, sharper, kinder, more energetic and sensitive man than he is. And the truth isn’t pretty.
ADDENDUM: Yesterday’s Three Martini Lunch podcast noted the harsh characterization of the late Shinzo Abe by some in the U.S. media, contrasted with the “austere religious scholar” characterization of the leader of ISIS. Some of the most provincial people you’ll ever meet are the ones telling you what to think about international affairs — incapable of seeing foreign leaders and foreign events outside of the lens of U.S. domestic politics. Generally, the smarter a person is, the more comfortable they are admitting what they don’t know.