Finally, Joe Biden has submitted himself to the test of a rigorous interview. Unfortunately it wasn’t conducted by Axios’s boomerang-slinger Jonathan Swan or Fox News’s Chris Wallace, both of whom have put President Trump through the wringer recently. Instead, Biden fielded questions from current rapper and future Pulitzer winner Cardi B in a Zoom call arranged by ELLE magazine.
Cardi B currently sits at the top of the charts with her R-rated Megan Thee Stallion collaboration ‘WAP’. She conducted her first political interview this time last year with then-Biden rival Bernie Sanders, who she supported. In fact, given the views she’s expressed in the past, you could feasibly imagine her and Biden butting heads.
‘How are you trying to go against a country and possibly start a war when this country lacks patriotism? I barely see people claiming they LOVE being American,’ she tweeted earlier this year. Seems like a good question for one of the Democratic party’s leading Iraq war cheerleaders, wouldn’t you think?
***
Get a digital subscription to The Spectator.
Try a month free, then just $3.99 a month
***
Instead the ELLE interview focused more on domestic policy. ‘What I want is free Medicare,’ Cardi tells Biden. ‘It’s important to have free healthcare because look what is happening right now. Of course, I think we need free college. And I want Black people to stop getting killed and no justice for it. I’m tired of it. I’m sick of it.’
‘There’s no reason why we can’t have all of that. Presidents have to take responsibility,’ Biden replies. ‘I understand one of your favorite presidents is Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt said the American people can take anything if you tell them the truth. Sometimes the truth is hard. But right now, we’re in a position where we have an opportunity to make so much progress. The American public has had the blinders taken off.’
It’s not exactly a solid commitment from the former VP, is it? While Cardi B’s favored initiatives may seem wacky and unrealistic, recent polls show that 69 percent of all voters support Medicare for All, as do 87 percent of Democrats. Canceling student debt and free college are supported by 58 percent of voters, according to a Hill-HarrisX Poll. Biden’s education policy includes free college for students with a household income of lower than $125,000 per year, and two years’ debt-free community college.
For all the Republican hemming and hawing about Biden’s ‘radical agenda‘, he’s still to the right of most of those who’ll be voting for him. And when selecting a woman of color to be his running mate, perhaps he should have considered a more principled politicker like Ms B. If the Biden campaign wants to ensure that people of color make it to the polls, they could do worse than a woman who pledges to ‘make that pullout game weak’…
