"I mean, you got the first sorta mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and- and- and clean, and a nice lookin' guy. I mean, it's -- that's a storybook, man!"
or
"I mean, you got the first sorta mainstream African-American, who is articulate and bright and- and- and clean, and a nice lookin' guy. I mean, it's -- that's a storybook, man!"
What Joe Biden said of Barack Obama -- it all comes down to one li'l comma.
Or a pause that is the equivalent of a comma.
I guess I'm a little behind on this story. A Scanners reader (thanks again, Matthew!) posted a comment with this link from Language Log that gets into more detail about what Biden said (including an actual recorded excerpt of the interview, so you can hear for yourself) versus what the New York Observer reported he said. It's so interesting I thought it deserved a separate top-level post.
From Mark Lieberman at Language Log:
But there's also a linguistic and a journalistic point here. Senator Biden's word sequence corresponds to two different sentences with very different meanings, and the Observer misquoted him by omitting the comma.Again, let me emphasize that I do not know what Biden was thinking when he said what he said. As I wrote before, I'm sure that some people use "articulate" (intentionally or not) to express their mild surprise that some African-Americans have a command of the English language.I don't know whether the Observer misrepresented Biden's statement out of ignorance, carelessness, or malice. Maybe [reporter Jason] Horowitz and his editors don't know the difference between the two types of relative clauses; maybe they didn't bother to think about the difference in interpretation in this case; or maybe they know the difference in general, thought about it in this case, and decided that it would make a better story to present the wrong version.
But having listened to the Biden interview excerpt, and considering the context of his remarks (sizing up his opponents for the Democratic presidential nomination), I agree with Lieberman that what Biden most likely meant was: Obama (the storybook political phenom behind "Obama-mania" -- a phrase that returns "about 105,000" results on Google) is the first African-American candidate who has a serious shot at the nomination because he is articulate and bright and clean and nice-looking. (I'm more disturbed by the word "clean," but I assume he's talking about the first-term senator's lack of negative baggage, not how often he showers. But I don't see how any of those adjectives in the second part of his sentence can be construed as prejudicial -- especially in politics. I welcome Joe Biden to say the same things about me, as long as he's sincere.)
In this context, if you can't describe a man like Senator Barack Obama, former president of the Harvard Law Review, as "articulate" (as in "Expressing oneself easily in clear and effective language: an articulate speaker"), then the word has no real-world meaning -- unless you honestly think Biden was attempting to point out that his fellow senator is "Endowed with the power of speech." Look: With Obama in the race, Biden doesn't have a chance at the nomination, anyway. I would love for Obama to be our next president. How refreshing it would be to have someone in the White House who expresses himself easily in clear and effective language. Or who knows how to pronounce "nuclear." Or who knows the difference between "dissemble" and "dissasemble"...
"I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe — I believe what I believe is right." — President George W. Bush, Rome, Italy, July 22, 2001
Hi Jim,
If I understand your point, it's that the comma moves the phrase closer to "..first sorta African-American, who, by the way, is also articulate and bright.."
That sounds ridiculous, because we can't accept that he's starting afresh; he must be using those adjectives in contrast to the subject: the 1st half-African-American candidate. I don't know what he was thinking but imho the comma wouldn't improve things.
JE: That's not quite the way I read it. Seems to me the adjectives relate to the phrase "first sorta mainstream African-American" and the unspoken but implied word "candidate," not "African-American" alone. The point of the sentence was to describe what a "storybook" political phenomenon Obama has become, to describe his magnitude as a rival . To me, Biden seems to be saying the guy is "the first mainstream African-American candidate, a candidate who is articulate and bright and clean and nice-looking." The first part of the sentence addresses Obama's appeal to the political mainstream; the second dependent clause lists the qualities that contribute to his mainstream appeal and make him a formidable candidate. In Biden's formulation, he definitely considers "mainstream African-American" a political plus. The way he said it did not mean previous African-American candidates were not "articulate, bright, clean and good-looking," but that they either were not "mainstream" in their political beliefs, or popular enough to have had a real shot at the nomination.
BTW, last night I caught up with Biden's "Daily Show" interview from last week and he criticized himself for using the word "clean," when what he meant was "fresh" -- as in a fresh face with new ideas and, as a newcomer to national politics, unencumbered by past baggage -- unlike Biden himself, Edwards (Kerry's running-mate in 2004), and Hillary Clinton.
Sometimes it is best to speak in shorter sentences. I think newspapers are losing some of their effect because they insist on trying to convey ALL of the information in one sentence.
Biden may have just fatally shot his Presidential hopes.
"Biden may have just fatally shot his Presidential hopes."
What hopes? He's behind Obama, Clinton, Edwards and even Al Gore if he decided to run (which he probably won't). It would take a very strange sequence of events for Biden to get the nomination, even without the improperly punctuated remarks.
I think the entire thing turns on the interpretation of the line "that's a storybook, man", because if you take it to mean that it's a storybook that there is A candidate who is mainstream, clean, bright, articulate, and nice-looking then that's one thing, but if you take it to mean that it's a storybook that a BLACK candidate is all of those other things, then you get closer to the interpretation of condescension. I hope and believe he intended the former, but to ears (rightfully or otherwise) sensitive to racist rhetoric, it may have sounded like the latter.
Unfortunately, while words do have meaning (though they seem to have increasingly less meaning today. I think it started slipping around the time Clinton was asking the definition of is), they are not used in a vacuum; they require interpretation, based on context. And the context in which this statement was made by Biden (old/middle-aged white man referring a black public figure as "articulate") has historically been an act of, direct or indirect, condescension, and interpreted as such, and that's why I think many people reacted as they did.
JE: Very nicely put, Jason. I'd like to use the "a-word" to praise what you wrote, but I don't know your race, so... well, you know.
late comment, but why not. i find it interesting that Biden never really fully explained himself. Not that he has to do so. There always someone to justify it away. One fact I will point out, If the same thing was said by a conservative or a republican, the end of it would not have been heard. And I will agree that Obama is "relatively" 'clean' of political baggage... Of course he's also clean of political experience being 3 years in a senate seat and having used two of those years to compaign for a different office.