On race, Joe Biden's choices in Delaware years ago haunt his White House bid today
WASHINGTON - Joe Biden could feel himself losing the crowd - and along with it, the perception that he was politically unbeatable.
The voters watching wanted an apology. But Biden jabbered on about "de facto" versus "de jure" segregation in schools. He exploded into anger when accused of double-talk.
"The audience kept pushing," Biden would later reflect. "What they wanted was a full-out mea culpa and a hard statement ... and I got hot."
This wasn't last month's Democratic debate Biden was talking about, where he also mishandled a demand for an apology. It was an event 40 years earlier, an incident that still haunted Biden when he wrote about it in his 2007 memoir.
The crowd of hundreds of working-class voters were packed into the gymnasium of a suburban school outside Wilmington, Del. This crowd didn't want him to apologize for fighting federally mandated busing, as Sen. Kamala Harris,
