WATCH: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton Both Used Joe Biden ‘Millions Fewer Words’ Talking Point

Former Vice President Joe Biden stepped on a rake during this week’s debate when he responded to a question about the legacy of slavery with a rambling response about vocabulary, record players, and social workers for black parents and children.

At Thursday night’s ABC News Democratic presidential debate, Biden was asked by moderator Linsey Davis, “What responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?”

His response included dealing with “the problems that come from home,” and the suggestion that “We bring social workers into homes with parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help, they don’t know quite what to do. Play the radio, make sure the television — make sure you have the record player on at night, the phone. Make sure that kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school — a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.”

That response earned blistering criticism that has continued unabated ever since, both for the content of the response and the context, which was a question about the legacy of slavery. Time editor at large Anand Giridharadas, who called it a “racist, classist, incoherent, and disqualifying moment that should send him into retirement today.”

Rolling Stone’s Jamil Smith says Biden should drop out because “Democrats need an antiracist nominee to run against a racist like Donald Trump. The third debate confirmed Biden isn’t up to the task.”

It remains to be seen how much this episode damages Biden politically. He’s taking a lot of heat for it from influential liberal commentators, and the moment has been covered extensively by all three cable news networks.

On the other hand, Biden’s history of dicey racist remarks is already fairly well-known, and may indeed be baked into the durable support he has enjoyed thus far in the primary. The black voters who are keeping Biden in such a dominant position in the polls have heard him say this, and worse, for many years.

Those same supporters have also heard elements of Biden’s answer — albeit in vastly different contexts and with significantly greater deftness — from two of the most popular politicians for Democrats and black voters.

In July of 2014, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke at Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute about a campaign to encourage parents to “talk read and sing to their kids, and close an education gap.”

Clinton said that “By the age of four, children in lower income families have heard 30 million fewer words than children in more affluent families,” and that “scientists can literally watch the synapses and neurons firing when parents read and talk with their children from the very earliest days.”

The campaign was part of a Clinton Foundation initiative called “Too Small to Fail.”

And then-future President Barack Obama campaigned on, then delivered, funding for “voluntary programs that provide nurses, social workers, and other professionals to meet with at-risk families in their homes and connect them to assistance that impacts a child’s health, development, and ability to learn.”

President Obama also cited the vocabulary gap frequently, as he did in this February 27, 2014 speech that also referenced resources like those Biden spoke about.

[W]e know that during the first three years of life, a child born into a low-income family hears 30 million fewer words than a child born into a well-off family. And everybody knows babies are sponges, they just soak that up. A 30-million-word deficit is hard to make up. And if a black or Latino kid isn’t ready for kindergarten, he’s half as likely to finish middle school with strong academic and social skills. So by giving more of our kids access to high-quality early education — and by helping parents get the tools they need to help their children succeed — we can give more kids a better shot at the career they’re capable of, and the life that will make us all better off.

As it turns out, the science behind the vocabulary gap — revised down to 4 million words from 30 million — is shaky, and maybe racially biased.

The point isn’t that Biden’s comments are the same as Clinton’s or Obama’s — they aren’t, and Obama and Clinton each took their fair share of criticism on issues of race. But people who are expecting Biden’s support to crumble over this may be disappointed if it turns out his other qualities — perceived ability to beat Trump, Obama-era goodwill — outweigh this incident when the next round of polls comes in.

Watch Biden’s remarks above, via ABC News.