Joe Biden is discovering one of the pitfalls of populating his cabinet with minorities. Some of them have names that are hard (for him) to pronounce. Like Becerra. It’s not as if Xavier Becerra is a newcomer to the U.S. political scene. He was a member of Congress for 24 years, 13 of them while Biden was still in the Senate. Becerra rose to even greater prominence among Democrats in 2017, when he was named attorney general of California.
In fact, Biden was familiar enough with Becerra’s “achievements” to appoint him to a cabinet post. So how is it he was unable to pronounce the man’s name correctly in two tries? Have a look.
Notice that he refers to Becerra the first time as Bacaria (bok-uh-REE-uh), the second time as (buh-CHER-uh). He even flubs the name of the department he is naming Becerra to, calling it Health and Education Services — a confusion that arises ostensibly out of the fact that until 1979 there was a Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. (RELATED: About Joe Biden’s mispronunciation of ‘psalmist’)
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
But Biden’s difficulty pronouncing the nominee’s name is the least of his problems regarding this decision. The more pressing issue is why select a man to head up HHS who has utterly no background in health, unless you consider his recommendation for decriminalizing crossings between ports of entry on the southern border, for example, a matter of health. Another of Becerra’s radical pronouncements as California AG was to ban state-funded travel to Iowa in 2019 because its Medicaid laws didn’t fund sex change surgery. (RELATED: Biden’s HHS pick thinks AR-15s are ‘not in common use for self defense’)
If there’s a moral in all of this it is that if you are going to play identity politics, you had better be good at it.
