There was a link off the Drudge Report that caught my eye: "Sen. Biden: 'My State Was a Slave State'....." Since nobody has written any intelligent commentary about this yet, and I'm sure it was placed online in a continuing effort to thwart Senator Biden's presidential campaign, I will offer my two cents, mainly because I vaguely remember the class report on Delaware when I was in elementary school (all of the kids in our class had to do reports on different states). Although I am sure the senator will catch his fair share of slack from the republican and democrat machinery, it turns out that even taken out of the context, Senator Biden's comments are correct (technically).
Delaware has three counties, with the population being concentrated in the northern most county. According to Wikipedia, Delaware (like Kentucky) was a slave state that voted not to secede from the union. So, despite the "spin" that will be put on this quote (such as his Dunkin Donuts comment from a few months back), he was right. Now why this makes the news is beyond me. If anything, it further indicates that the Democratic party continues to splinter and pale in comparison to the uniformity of the Republican machine. And when such splintering occurs, most people tend to look at and/or blame management.
In case my two cents worth of commentary does get picked up by the mainstream media, I would like to perpetuate a little known fact about the First State: The three counties I mentioned earlier were part of Pennsylvania and were known as "The Lower Three Counties." William Penn (owner of Penn's Woods, or as you know it now, "Pennsylvania") and Lord De La Warr and a couple of other early colonial masterminds were up late one night playing poker. De La Warr was ahead and because Penn believed he had an unbeatable hand, he bet the lower three counties that he would win. Needless to say, he was incorrect. While the exact hand that won has been lost over time, the end result and rumor is that Delaware was won from Pennsylvania in a poker game. Remember, if it's on the Internet, it must be true. In fact, you'd be stupid not to believe it.
Back on point: Rather than risk its status as a state during the Civil War, and because the population of the state favored the Union, Delaware remained a northern state and somewhere in the mix came the quote (roughly) "We were the first to join and we'll be the last to leave." I'm not sure who said it, and apparently neither did this website, but I'm sure it was the governor or a duPont. So, Senator Biden's comments are based in fact and again, why this got picked up by the mainstream internet media is beyond me. [YOUR AD COULD GO HERE].
Additional note: The full story (finally) hit the AP wire about an hour after Drudge linked it and I wrote my commentary on it. It's a good thing news on the Internet has a shelf life of 36 hours nowadays. (This last link is Noam Cohen's July 17, 2006 NY Times article "News Online Seems to Have Long Shelf Life.")
Sunday, August 27, 2006
Delaware's a slave state? Well, yes and no...
Tags:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
This may be an attempt to discredit Biden, but he is the one who said it, so I don't think reporting on it is a bad thing. It is historically based, but the way he was talking about it was kind of odd, like he wanted to position his state as far from being liberal as possible. It was as if being from a "slave state" was politically preferable to being from a "liberal" state. Biden is treating the word "liberal" like it's poison!
Post a Comment