Booker Sides with Castro in ‘Tough Point’ Time Tussle with Biden

Democratic Presidential Candidate Cory Booker responds to former Vice President Joe Biden's comments about kids wearing hoodies, saying the DNC nominee needs to talk about race in a far more constructive way.

In post-debate remarks, U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) said he did not think former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro undertook an unfair offensive against former Vice President Joe Biden.

“I think we are at a tough point right now, because there’s a lot of people concerned about Joe Biden’s ability to carry the ball all the way across the end line without fumbling,” Booker told CNN’s Erin Burnett. “And I think that Castro had really legitimate concerns about can he be someone in a long grueling campaign… and has every right to call out.”

During the debate, the former HUD secretary derisively asked the 76-year old Biden if “he was forgetting” something about which he had just spoke.

Castro said Biden’s Medicare plan would not automatically enroll people in government-provided health insurance. Biden said that wasn’t true, prompting Castro to pounce.
“Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago?” Castro asked the former vice president. “Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago? I can’t believe that you said — two minutes ago — that they had to buy in and now you’re forgetting that. We need a health care system where you’re automatically enrolled.”

In an attack oblique enough to make fellow contender Julian Castro’s offensive look like shock and awe by comparison, nice guy with an ulterior motive Booker noted Thurmond’s longest filibuster in the history of the nation against civil rights.

Mired in single digits, Booker mentioned Thurmond at the ABC News-Univision Democratic Presidential Debate in connection with his argument that, as a denizen of urban America, he would advocate for racial justice unlike any of the other people onstage.

“We have systemic racism that is eroding our nation, our healthcare to the criminal justice system,” Booker pointed out. “We have a criminal justice system that is so racially biased. We have more African American under criminal supervision today than all the slaves in 1850.”

The Thurmond dredge contrasted with fellow rival Senator Kamala Harris’s frontal assault on Biden in another debate this summer, which landed the California senator post debate headlines but did little to give her a sustained bounce.

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