Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Visiting Wisconsin, Biden talks of watershed on race
KENOSHA, Wis. — Joe Biden told residents of Kenosha, Wis., that recent turmoil after the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, could help Americans confront centuries of systemic racism.
“We’re finally now getting to the point where we’re going to be addressing the original sin of this country, 400 years old … slavery and all the vestiges of it,” Biden said at Grace Lutheran Church, where he met with community leaders after a private session with Blake and his family.
The visit marked the former vice president’s first trip to the battleground state of Wisconsin as the Democratic presidential nominee. Biden spent more than an hour with the Blake family.
President Donald Trump was in Kenosha on Tuesday to tour the damage caused by rioters and meet with a few local officials to praise and support law enforcement.
“I can’t say, if tomorrow God made me president, I can’t guarantee you everything gets solved in four years,” Biden said. But “it would be a whole [lot] better, we’d get a whole lot further down the road.”
“There’s certain things worth losing over,” he concluded, “and this is something worth losing over if you have to — but we’re not going to lose.”
Blake remains hospitalized after being shot in the back seven times by a white Kenosha police officer while authorities were trying to arrest him Aug. 23. The shooting is the latest police confrontation with a Black man to spark protests. It follows demonstrations that swelled nationwide after George Floyd was killed by a white Minneapolis officer in May.
Outside Grace Lutheran, Blake’s uncle, Justin Blake, compared Trump’s and Biden’s visits as he marched and chanted with a crowd. “Trump didn’t ask about my nephew. Trump didn’t mention my nephew’s name while he was here,” Justin Blake said.
Justin Blake called Biden “more of a unifier” but said “we’re holding everybody’s feet to the fire. Nobody gets a free pass.”
A PLEA FOR ACTION
Biden heard similar sentiments inside the church, where residents offered accounts of their struggles.
Porsche Bennett, an organizer for Black Lives Activists Kenosha, told Biden she’s “tired” at just 31 and worried for her three young children. “For so many decades we’ve been shown we don’t matter,” she said, adding that she’s heard promises from plenty of politicians, but not “action.”
Biden answered that, because he’s white, “I can’t understand what it’s like to walk out the door or send my son out the door or my daughter and worry about, just because they’re Black, they might not come back.”
But he compared the current era of cellphone videos of violent police actions to television footage showing civil-rights protesters being beaten more than a half-century ago. He called both circumstances a politically crucial awakening for white Americans. Biden also stressed the disproportionate effects of the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout on non-whites.
“I think the country is much more primed to take responsibility, because they now have seen what you see,” Biden told Bennett, the community organizer.
Barb DeBerge, owner of DeBerge Framing & Gallery, told Biden of the deep pain exposed by the protests and how it has reached many business owners whose establishments have been burned. DeBerge noted her shop still stands, but said, “I just, I don’t think I really grieved as much as I should, because being a business owner, I have to keep going, I have to keep working.”
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, said he’d asked both Biden and Trump not to come. “I would prefer that no one be here, be it candidate Trump or candidate Biden,” Evers said at a news conference.
Yet Kenosha was mostly calm for Biden’s visit, other than some verbal jousting outside the church between activists, including Bennett, and at least one Trump supporter. When the president visited Tuesday, a few hundred proand anti-Trump protesters convened at the spot.
Michelle Stauder, a 60-year-old retired Kenosha school teacher, said Biden is “here spreading the word of peace and rebuilding.”
Kenneth Turner stood nearby with a Trump-Pence yard sign. “Everyone is blaming Trump for everything,” the 50-year-old Kenosha man said. “But problems here have been around a long time before Trump.”
The former vice president, who enjoyed police union backing for much of his political career, has defended officers for bravery and public service. But he said again Thursday that policing must be overhauled. He repeated his promise of a national commission on policing if he’s elected.
Biden said he does not want to “defund the police.” But he proposes that local forces agree to certain best practices as a condition of federal grants. He also wants to spend more on other public agencies, such as mental health services, to ease social problems police must handle by default, sometimes with violent consequences.
During his Kenosha trip Tuesday, Trump toured damaged buildings and discussed ways to quell unrest with law enforcement officials. He was greeted by supporters.
Trump’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien, said Biden’s visit to Kenosha was inappropriate, arguing Trump went because he is president and that Biden is only “injecting politics into a really serious situation that the president helped solve.”
TRUMP IN PENNSYLVANIA
Meanwhile, Trump was holding a rally in Latrobe, Pa., on Thursday night as his campaign claims signs of momentum in the state — a longtime Democratic stronghold that Trump won in 2016.
Campaign officials have been feeling encouraged in the past few weeks as Trump has pivoted to a “law and order” message amid protests and riots over racial injustice. They believe efforts to paint Biden as weak on crime will help Trump win suburban voters, especially women, who supported him in 2016.
That includes in Pennsylvania, where they argue the president is in a better position than he was in 2016, citing Democrats’ shrinking voter registration advantage. This time, they believe their get-out-the-vote operation will result in better turnout among working-class rural voters, along with improved margins among Black, Hispanic and union supporters.
“Between the record enthusiasm for this President, our unprecedented ground game, and trends in Republican voter registrations, the Commonwealth, once again, is ready to deliver for President Trump this November,” Nick Trainer, the campaign’s director of battleground strategies, said in a statement.
Trump and his team have been paying frequent visits to the state as they work to build enthusiasm. On Tuesday, Vice President Mike Pence held a “Workers for Trump” rally at a construction company less than 15 miles from Biden’s hometown of Scranton.
“I know we’re not too far from our opponent’s boyhood home, but it’s Trump country now,” Pence told the crowd.
Biden’s campaign remains equally confident about his prospects in the state. They have put considerable emphasis on the Pittsburgh metro area, where Democrats lost ground in 2016 but then watched Democratic congressional candidate Conor Lamb pull an upset in a special election.
Still, Biden’s path in Pennsylvania is seen as more complicated than winning back Wisconsin and Michigan, the two other “blue wall” states that Trump won by less than 1 percentage point four years ago.