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Dear Joe,
Excuse me for not addressing you as Mr. Vice-President or even Mr. Biden. I suppose that would be more appropriate, but you seem to revel in being a regular guy from Scranton, so I’ll dispense with the formalities for now.
I know you weren’t pleased with Kamala Harris’s critique of your stance on busing at the recent Democratic candidates’ debate. You thought she mischaracterized your position and you felt her personal story of the benefits of busing was irrelevant.
As you explained it, you never opposed the kind of voluntary busing efforts undertaken by Harris’s Berkeley city council. You always supported such initiatives if chosen by local communities. It was just federally mandated busing you opposed.
I’d like to think you just haven’t thought about this for a while. Perhaps debates over school desegregation — holdovers from an era before the courts relinquished oversight of such matters — are now so distant as to be but faded memories to you. Perhaps you haven’t given thought to how problematic your position was because the issue of busing is so dated as to mean virtually nothing to at least one if not two full generations of American students.
