(The Washington Examiner)
Joe Biden once praised the segregationist Republican Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina as “one of my closest friends” and championed him as someone who believed in America's diversity. He was giving a speech at the Strom Thurmond Institute in South Carolina in December 1988. Thurmond, Biden said, had urged him to keep running for president, telling him: "You’ve got a good 30 years left to try." A year earlier, Biden had dropped out of the presidential race amid plagiarism accusations. He ran again in 2008, dropping out early a second time, and now, 31 years after the speech, he is having a third tilt at the White House.
Biden, then 46, was serving in the Senate at the time and had recently dropped out of the 1988 presidential race amid plagiarism accusations. He accepted an invitation from the Strom Thurmond Institute at Clemson University to speak about foreign policy to high school and college students.
Biden began his remarks by describing the close relationship he developed with Thurmond after joining the Senate in 1973.
Thurmond, a Southern Democrat-turned-Republican, ran for president in 1948 on a segregationist platform and led a record-setting filibuster to block the Civil Rights Act in 1957. He later softened his stance on civil rights issues in the 1980s but never fully renounced his position on segregation or the racially inflammatory comments he made during his presidential campaign. Read more