After Vice President Joe Biden infamously told an audience that Mitt Romney is “going to unchain Wall Street,” and concluded they are “going to put y’all back in chains,” Mr. Romney’s campaign cried foul. This was an obvious and unfair allusion to slavery, Mr. Romney’s surrogates argued.

Well, count veteran Congressman Charlie Rangel among Mr. Biden’s critics on the Democratic side of the aisle.

“The Vice President said he’s going to put “y’all in chains,'” Mr. Rangel told The Perez Notes in a recent free-wheeling interview. “Was he talking about slavery? You bet your ass he was. Was he using the vernacular? Yes, he was. Did he think it was cute? Yes, he did. Was it something stupid to say? You bet your life it was stupid.”

“It was something that if a black had said it, we would have been laughing, because we would know deep down, they may be beating the hell out of us but they ain’t thinking about putting us into any chains,” he added.

Republicans have called on Mr. Biden to apologize, but that doesn’t seem likely to happen anytime soon.

“Let’s look at what the vice president said: Speaker Boehner and even Paul Ryan have been traveling this country talking about the need to unshackle the private sector, to unshackle the financial industry,” Mr. Obama’s deputy campaign manager, Stephanie Cutter, argued earlier this week. “And the vice president was just taking that metaphor a step further and talking about wanting to put other people in shackles. And the word that he used, chains, is a distraction from the larger argument.”

Watch below: (skip to 3:00)

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpBXhNlVlRQ%5D