The controversy over Joe Biden's comments on working with two avowed Senate segregationists is unsettling his campaign at a crucial point, The Washington Post reported.
Looming are are the first presidential debate next week and a multi-candidate event before black voters in South Carolina on Friday — but this week, Biden has been trying to rectify his claim to be a civil rights champion with past views at odds with the Democratic base, the Post reported.
According to the Post, Biden's campaign distributed talking points to supporters emphasizing that segregationists late Sen. James Eastland, D-Miss., and former Sen. Herman Talmadge, D-Ga., "were people who he fundamentally disagreed with on the issue of civil rights."
But divisions have come up in the Biden campaign over how he should handle such situations.
The Post also revealed the content letters Biden wrote to Eastland in the 1970s that show him trying to curry favor with the elder senator.
In one 1972 letter, he asks for some committee assignments and then thanks him for the help a few weeks later. In another in 1977, Biden wrote Eastland for help on one of his early legislative proposals: to combat a court order that racially segregated school districts bus children to create more integrated classrooms, a practice Biden opposed and wanted to change.
"I want you to know that I very much appreciate your help during this week's committee meeting in attempting to bring my antibusing legislation to a vote," Biden wrote, the Post reported.
Biden said at the time he did not think that busing was the best way to integrate schools in Delaware and systemic racism should be dealt with by investing in schools and improving housing policies.
Later letters continued pushing his legislation.
Biden advisers also are trying to play down his comments Sen. Eastland did not refer to him as a "boy" — an insult leveled at African American men — but as "son." Advisers said the comments were a a garbled rendition of a familiar Biden anecdote.
"He just misspoke," one Biden adviser told the Post. "The way Biden usually tells the story, he says Eastland didn't call him 'senator,' he called him 'son,'" the adviser said. "Eastland called him 'boy' and 'son' also. This was Eastland's way of diminishing young senators."
Biden has also scheduled a sit-down interview with MSNBC, and some black supporters are eager to hear the former vice president offer a fuller explanation, the Post reported.
"I think he's got to address it head on and show people what his line of thinking was," Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist in South Carolina, told the Post. "I don't think they need to get off course with their strategy. I just think they have to address it as it comes up and move on."
Other Biden supporters think he should stand by his long-held beliefs.
"I encouraged campaign staff that I know to say: 'Don't back off on this. This is precisely why you're the right guy in the right place at the right time.' And I was glad to see that he didn't," Dave O'Brien, a longtime Biden supporter in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, told the Post.