Vice President Joe Biden staked his claim to the labor vote by declaring that “it’s time to take back America” in order to ensure that the middle class gets an “equal share” of prosperity in the country.

“If we don’t, America’s in trouble,” Biden said in Detroit Monday.

Biden’s comments come shortly after Attorney General Eric Holder said that such language is racist.


“There’s a certain level of vehemence, it seems to me, that’s directed at me [and] directed at the president,” Holder told ABC last month, per the Hill. “You know, people talking about taking their country back. . . . There’s a certain racial component to this for some people. I don’t think this is the thing that is a main driver, but for some there’s a racial animus.”

And Obama agrees, or seemed to think so in 2011, according to U.S. News and World Report’s Ken Walsh.

“A guest suggested that when Tea Party activists said they wanted to ‘take back’ their country, their real motivation was to stir up anger and anxiety at having a black president, and Obama didn’t dispute the idea,” Walsh wrote. “He agreed that there was a ‘subterranean agenda’ in the anti-Obama movement — a racially biased one — that was unfortunate. But he sadly conceded that there was little he could do about it.”