“We’ve got to re-create the Obama coalition to win,” Harris continued, “and that means women, that’s people of color, that’s our LGBTQ community, that’s working people, that’s our labor unions. But that is how we are going to win this election, and I intend to win.”
Read: The Democratic Party apologizes to black voters
Buttigieg noted that he leads a diverse city and that while he has never experienced discrimination based on the color of his skin, he’s had, as a gay man, “the experience of sometimes feeling like a stranger in my own country.” Harris did not back down, however, from her larger implied argument against Buttigieg—that Democrats need, as they had in Barack Obama, “a leader who had worked in many communities, knows those communities, and has the ability to bring people together.”
When Booker next got a chance to speak, he jumped back to that discussion, drawing laughs when he noted that he had been excluded the first time around. “I have a lifetime of experience with black voters. I’ve been one since I was 18,” he said. “Nobody on this stage should need a focus group to hear from African American voters.”
“Black voters are pissed off, and they’re worried,” he continued. “They’re pissed off because the only time [their issues are paid attention] by politicians is when people are looking for their vote … We don’t want to see people miss this opportunity and lose because we are nominating someone that isn’t trusted, doesn’t have authentic connection. And so that’s what’s on the ballot.”
Booker then pivoted to an attack on Biden, who this week reiterated his opposition to legalizing marijuana and seemed to be summoning the drug wars of the 1980s and ’90s when he called it a “gateway drug.”
“I thought you might have been high when you said it,” Booker said, again to laughs. “Marijuana in our country is already legal for privileged people. The War on Drugs has been a war on black and brown people.”
Biden protested that he supports decriminalizing marijuana and would release those currently serving time in federal prisons on low-level charges. But then he stumbled, claiming that “I come out of the black community in terms of my support” and asserting that he has an endorsement from “the only African American woman that’d ever been elected to the United States Senate.”
“No ... the other one is here,” Harris interjected, as Biden tried to clarify that he meant the first black woman, Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois.
Harris and Booker couldn’t have made their point better if they had tried. Biden’s claim to black support—while backed up in polls at the moment—seemed to come out of an earlier era, when the “first black president” was not Barack Obama but Bill Clinton, and when white politicians relied on endorsements over authentic experience to prove their connection to the black community.