Former US vice president Joe Biden on Thursday faced repeated criticism on multiple fronts from his Democratic rivals for the 2020 presidential nomination, including calls to leave the battle to oust US President Donald Trump to a younger generation.
In a sometimes scrappy showdown of the Democratic heavyweights, US Senator Kamala Harris landed several blows on Biden in the second of two nationally televised debates, putting him on the defensive as he argued that he is best-positioned to take on the Republican president.
Biden said that Trump has “horrible” policies that have exacerbated income inequality, while his chief rival for the nomination, US Senator Bernie Sanders, called Trump “a pathological liar and a racist.”
Photo: Reuters
However, 76-year-old Biden also found himself on the receiving end of a pointed attack from a lower-tier candidate who is half his age.
US Representative Eric Swalwell, 38, called on him to “pass the torch” to a new generation better equipped to tackle climate change, expand healthcare coverage and reduce gun violence.
“I’m still holding on to that torch,” Biden replied.
Several rivals were clearly seeking to wrench it from his grip, including Harris, who made a stirring call for Biden to recognize his recent “hurtful” comments about being civil with avowedly segregationist US senators.
Biden, with the room dead quiet, said that he does not “praise racists” and denied that he opposed initiatives in the 1970s to bus children from predominantly black communities to better schools in more prosperous neighborhoods.
“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bussed to school every day,” Harris said, in one of the evening’s most potent moments.
“That little girl was me,” she said.
Another candidate in the upper tier, Pete Buttigieg, has also faced criticism after a fatal shooting of a black man by a white police officer in South Bend, Indiana, where he is mayor.
“When I look into his mother’s eyes, I have to face the fact that nothing that I say will bring him back,” Buttigieg said. “It’s a mess. We are hurting.”
With so many potential challengers to Trump, the party needed to split the top 20 candidates into debates over two nights in Miami.
Thursday’s session featured four of the race’s top five candidates in national polling, including Biden’s main challenger, Sanders, a 77-year-old whose high-spending policies have pushed the party leftward in recent years.
Harris, 54, might have vaulted herself into serious contention with her composed performance and steely showdown with Biden.
After the debate she said that it was not personal.
“I otherwise have a great deal of respect for Joe Biden,” she said. “I do not believe he is a racist.”
Biden in his closing remarks, called for restoration of “the “soul” of the country after Trump “ripped it out.”
“We have got to unite the United States of America,” he said.
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