Joe Biden promised to immediately publish internal campaign statistics on the diversity of his campaign staff, information he has been reluctant to disclose for months, at a virtual town hall on Saturday.
“Today I will give you information on staff diversity as soon as we end this call,” promised moderator Amna Nawaz of “PBS Newshour,” who pressured him on the issue at a forum on Asian and Pacific Island issues. .
He went directly to his team, which he said was listening, and instructed them to “pick up the phone and call her.”
“My administration will resemble the United States,” he promised. “It will be a reflection of who we are as a nation.”
Biden has boasted of minority representation in his campaign. “I have the most diverse staff of all that run. I’ve always done that, “he insisted on an NPR interview last December.
But unlike Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in 2016 and most of their 2020 rivals, Biden has never backed that claim with evidence, Buzzfeed News reported this week, and the former veep is under increasing pressure to choose a career partner. minority.
At Saturday’s forum, Biden pledged to reverse President Trump’s restrictive immigration policies, vowing to increase limits on legal immigrants to 125,000 a year, allow at least 95,000 refugees to enter the U.S. annually, and end to Trump’s recent crackdown on employment-based H1B visas.
“People with these visas built this country,” he said.
And he asked his Republican rival when asked if he should get out of the coronavirus seclusion at his Delaware home as the election season heats up.
“The more Donald Trump is out there, the worse he does it,” Biden said. “I think it is wonderful that he has come out … his numbers have fallen to the ground.”
Trump did not participate in the virtual forum, but instead sent campaign substitute Eddie Baza Calvo, the former governor of Guam, who defended Trump from accusations of racism caused by his humorous use of the term “Kung flu” to describe COVID-19. .
“I have to tell you that my president is not orthodox in his words,” Calvo said, adding that the term had first come up in 2015, with a campaign by the local Veterans Administration urging veterinarians to be vaccinated against the flu.
“If you take a look at history, that Kung Flu comment even came from the Obama administration,” he said.
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