"So what makes Biden 'mainstream'?"

I'm lazily quoting today instead of being original. But Kos's comments are on target. Joe Biden has been savaged, and rightly so, for his remarks a few days ago (I'm paraphrasing) that Barak Obama is the first mainstream black presidential candidate who is articulate and clean.

So what makes Biden "mainstream"?

Kos on Daily Kos

Sat Feb 03, 2007 at 09:27:18 AM PST

Jay Carney is Time's Washington Bureau Chief. It's instructive to see what his definition of "mainstream" is:

CARNEY (1/31/07): What Biden was saying, and this is Biden’s fault for not being clear in what he was saying in this interview, is that there hasn’t been a candidate, a viable African-American candidate with all those qualities in one.

MATTHEWS: And mainstream.

CARNEY: Who is mainstream.

MATTHEWS: Mainstream is the key to me.

CARNEY: Who didn’t come from the civil rights movement, you know, who came up through elected office, who wasn’t, you know, simply a boutique or fringe candidate...

Martin Luther King? He wouldn't have been "mainstream" because he came up via the civil rights movement. Nor Jesse Jackson, even though he won 11 states and 6.9 million votes in 1988. Being part of the civil rights movement is immediate disqualification for being "mainstream" in Carney's world. Carol Moseley Braun doesn't qualify as "mainstream" because, while being Senator of the nation's fifth largest state, she was a "boutique" or "fringe" candidate.

The big irony about all of this is that by this definition, Biden himself isn't a "mainstream" candidate.

Why would he? He's by all rights a "boutique" candidate. The largest number of votes he's ever won is 165,465 in his 1996 Delaware Senate race (Moseley Braun got 2.6 million votes in her Illinois Senate victory in 1992). In all polls, he's in the low single digits. Unlike Jesse Jackson, Biden has never won a primary.

So what makes Biden a "mainstream" candidate?

The fact that he's white, apparently. Because if he was black, Carney and Biden and Matthews would clearly all agree that he wouldn't be "mainstream".