Racism Questions, Trump Jr. Give Biden-Harris Clash Longevity

(Bloomberg) -- Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are coming in hot from Thursday night’s Democratic debate as chatter focused on two race-driven topics -- “birtherism” and “busing” -- gained legs on the internet.

If Google Trends are any indication of the American electorate, Harris came out on top as the most-searched candidate from last week’s pair of debates, which gave millions of potential voters their first look at the huge slate of Democratic hopefuls.

Echoes of the “birther” movement that sought to question Barack Obama’s heritage, a debate in which Donald Trump was a prominent figure, returned to the forefront of the national dialogue.

This time it was directed at Harris -- and inflamed by Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, who shared, then deleted, a tweet from a right-wing commentator questioning Harris’s race and whether it meant she was qualified to speak on racial issues.

Other 2020 Democrats are standing by the senator from California, the daughter of a Jamaican-born father and Indian immigrant mother.

Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, one of about two dozen Democrats currently seeking the 2020 presidential nomination, came to Harris’ defense on Saturday.

After clashing with Harris on a number of hot-button issues, former Vice President Biden came to her defense as well on Saturday.

And Cory Booker of New Jersey, another 2020 Democratic hopeful, tweeted that his Senate colleague doesn’t have anything to prove.

The comments came after Harris told Biden in the debate Thursday that it had been “hurtful” to hear him talk about his cordial relations decades ago with senators who’d built their careers on racial segregation.

She made it personal by referencing Biden’s opposition, as a senator from Delaware, to the practice of busing minority students to schools outside their local districts as a way to achieve integration.

“And there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day,” she said. “That little girl was me.”

‘Directly Impactful’

Biden called her comments “a mischaracterization.” On Friday he defended his record on civil rights in a speech in Chicago to Operation PUSH, a group founded by Jesse Jackson.

Harris’ campaign spokesman Ian Sams weighed in Sunday on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” saying that the candidate was able to show “why her ideas and her policies are directly impactful to Americans.”

“Ever since the comments that Vice President Biden made, this has been weighing on her mind,” he said. “This has to do with how she was raised, and how she got ahead and how she got a good education.”

Asked about Trump Jr.’s tweet, Sams said that “these are the same racist attacks as daddy tried on Barack Obama, and they didn’t work then and they’re not going to work now.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Hailey Waller in New York at hwaller@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: James Ludden at jludden@bloomberg.net, Ros Krasny, Steve Geimann

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