Republicans Seize On Biden's 'Middle Class' Remark

James Hill for The New York Times Supporters waited to greet Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. at a campaign rally on Tuesday in Charlotte, N.C.

A stray sentence by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Tuesday became the latest remark seized by the opposition and turned into a blistering line of attack against him.

After Mr. Biden described the middle class as having “been buried the last four years,’’ Republicans pounced, treating it as an unwitting admission of President Obama’s failures.

The vice president was criticizing the Republican ticket for pursuing a tax overhaul that would raise taxes on the middle class, he said.

“How can they justify raising taxes on the middle class that’s been buried the last four years?’’ Mr. Biden said at a campaign rally in Charlotte, N.C.

The Republican barrage came fast and furious by Twitter message, news release and campaign conference call. It began with a Twitter message from Mitt Romney’s account:

Agree with @joebiden, the middle class has been buried the last 4 years, which is why we need a change in November #CantAfford4More

— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) October 2, 2012

Campaigning in Iowa, Representative Paul D. Ryan reinforced the message. “Of course the middle class has been buried,’’ he said. “They’re being buried by regulations; they’re being buried by taxes; they’re being buried by borrowing. They’re being buried by the Obama administration’s economic failures.”

The Romney-Ryan campaign even held an afternoon press call with one of its fiercest surrogates, John Sununu, the former New Hampshire governor, to drive home the theme.

Republicans seemed to seize on the remark with special fervor, coming as it did one day before the first debate between Mr. Romney and President Obama, in which the cost of Mr. Romney’s proposed tax cuts for the rich and his disparagement of 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay income taxes are sure to be topics of discussion.

In response, the Obama campaign called the attacks “desperate and out of context.’’

“As the vice president has been saying all year and again in his remarks today, the middle class was punished by the failed Bush policies that crashed our economy,’’ a spokeswoman, Lis Smith, said.

In his North Carolina remarks, Mr. Biden was citing, as the Democrats have for months, an independent study that found that cutting tax rates by 20 percent and closing loopholes to avoid increasing the deficit, as Mr. Romney proposes, could be done only by raising taxes on households earning less than $200,000.

The audience booed.

“No, no – all kidding aside,’’ Mr. Biden said. “With all the boos – I mean, we can stop all that malarkey. Look, guys, this is deadly earnest, man. This is deadly earnest. How can they justify raising taxes on the middle class that’s been buried the last four years? How in the Lord’s name can they justify raising their taxes with these tax cuts?’’

Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan dispute the accuracy of the study, by the Tax Policy Center, and they have cited studies of their own showing their tax plan will not hit the middle class.

The maladroit sentence was the latest in a long series this year that have been yanked from context and used by the opposition, including Mr. Romney’s remark that he “liked to fire people” and Mr. Obama’s comment that “you didn’t build that.”

Later in the day, Mr. Biden clarified his meaning. “The middle class was buried by the policies that Romney and Ryan have supported,” he told a crowd in Asheville, N.C.

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Democrats to the White Working Class -- Drop Dead (ContributorNetwork)

COMMENTARY | A recent piece in the New York Times suggests the Democratic Party is preparing to toss working class whites, who have been part of the winning coalition for the Democrats since Franklin Roosevelt, under the bus.

The new coalition for the Democratic Party will consist of educated elites that will include "professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists" and poorer voters, primarily blacks and Hispanics. Working class whites have long be alienated from the Democrats since the phenomenon of the "Reagan Democrats," who switched to the Republican Party in the 1980s. Democrats lost this demographic group by 30 percent and more in the 2010 midterms.

The educated elites will be bought off with the support of rights to self expression, abortion, gay marriage and a leftward tilt on the environment and defense policy. The less affluent minorities will be bought off by new social spending and government assistance.

While the Democrats hope to hold their losses among working American whites down, one wonders how that could be accomplished if the sense grows that working people have been abandoned. Someone has to pay for all of that social spending that will benefit the poor, after all. Working whites also remain skeptical of government sanctioned hedonism, environmental regulations that stifle jobs, and cuts in defense spending that invite aggression from America's enemies.

Rush Limbaugh, the radio talk show host never slow to pick up on a political trend, suggested the Democrats are saying, on his Monday, broadcast, "If you work, we don't want you."

In a way, the new Democratic election strategy is a reaction to the tea party movement, which has risen from discontented working and middle class people who feel that their government has become too big and too intrusive. Instead of listening to the complaints of the tea party and adjusting their agenda to attract tea party voters, the Democrats have done the equivalent of extending them the middle finger. Instead they have embraced the Occupy Wall Street crowd, which is crying out for government handouts and entitlements.

This is a dangerous strategy. The tea party, consisting as it does of people who work and make the country run, are more numerous and more organized than the constituencies the Democrats are embracing. Thus the Democratic Party might have considered itself to permanent minority status.

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Dems invoke the ‘Kennedy Card’ to defend Obamacare in wake of failing CLASS Act (Daily Caller)

House Democrats worked to tug on the heartstrings Wednesday, playing to the “Kennedy card” several times while defending Obamacare in a congressional hearing. Sen. Ted Kennedy, who passed away in 2009, called socialized medicine “the cause of my life.”

The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health, and the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, were holding a joint hearing on the failures of Obamacare’s Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act, or CLASS Act.

The CLASS Act was supposed to be the part of Obamacare that provided a public “long-term care” option. It was also supposed to be financially self-sustaining. Conservative allegations that the CLASS Act was not financially self-sustaining were confirmed a little over a week ago when President Obama’s Health and Human Service Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced that the administration will not be implementing the CLASS Act because it is not financially solvent and, Sebelius said, it has no “viable path forward.”

Republicans view the CLASS Act’s failure as a major victory in the fight against Obamacare — and point to it as a “gimmick” used to make the president’s signature legislation look less expensive.

As the CLASS Act, and Obamacare in its entirety, came under fire yet again in Wednesday’s hearing, Democrats turned to the “Kennedy card” as one of their most frequent defenses.

Former Rhode Island Democratic Rep. Patrick Kennedy even came back to Congress to defend the CLASS Act, a “key priority” of his father — former Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy. Patrick Kennedy testified as part of special hearing panel that included Louisiana Republican Rep. Charles Boustany, Montana Republican Rep. Denny Rehberg and Florida Democratic Rep. Ted Deutch. The other panel that testified before the subcommittee consisted of two senior Obama administration officials, who were present to defend the CLASS Act.

Texas Democratic Rep. Gene Green offered glowing remarks for the late senator’s son, and thanked Patrick Kennedy for Ted Kennedy’s work in Congress. “I want to particularly welcome our former colleague Patrick Kennedy. Patrick, we worked together on lots of mental health issues over the years and I want to thank you for your service to the American people, and particularly to your district in Rhode Island,” Green said before defending Obamacare. “But, also I want to thank you for the service of your father. Without your father’s work in the Senate, I don’t have enough fingers and toes to list the issues that would not be in the law today, including the CLASS Act. [I want] just to generally thank you for the service of your family — I think all of us thank you for that.”

Illinois Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky cited Patrick Kennedy in her comments, too. “As former Representative Kennedy said, repealing the CLASS Act doesn’t mean that the widespread financial, physical and emotional suffering of older and disabled Americans goes away,” Schakowsky said as she questioned an Obama administration Health and Human Services official.

Right before accusing Republicans of turning the now-failed CLASS Act into a “political football,” Florida Democratic Rep. Kathy Castor invoked Kennedy rhetoric: “I’m going to borrow Patrick Kennedy’s language of a ‘Demographic Tsunami,’” Castor said, referring to issues she thinks exist in the long-term healthcare industry.

Florida Democratic Rep. Ted Deutch cited Ted Kennedy’s “dream” in his comments to the committee. Deutch isn’t a member of the Energy and Commerce committee, but appeared with Patrick Kennedy, Rehberg and Boustany on the opening special panel. “Senator Kennedy eloquently captured how our long-term care system is failing the American people when he said, ‘too often, they have to give up the American Dream — the dignity of a job, a home, and a family — so they can qualify for Medicaid, the only program that will support them,’” Deutch said in prepared testimony.

Even Patrick Kennedy played the Kennedy card. In his testimony, he cited his father’s work on the CLASS Act and how his father was deathly ill while working on finishing the legislation. “Our family was very fortunate,” Patrick Kennedy said in his prepared testimony. “We had the resources to provide my father with any long-term services and supports that he needed as he approached the end of his life — but he knew that most working families are not as fortunate. The inclusion of the long-term care infrastructure (CLASS) in health care reform was a signature issue for my father.”

“Even before he became ill, my father saw a need for an alternative solution, realizing that for persons with disabilities and older Americans, long-term services and supports are their primary unmet care need, and that while 45 million Americans lack medical insurance, 200 million adult Americans lack any insurance protection against the costs of these services,” Patrick Kennedy added.

Republican Rehberg, in his testimony, said the Democrats’ testimonies were political spin. Rehberg, who is the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, hit the Democrats for hiding the damage caused by the CLASS Act underneath political games.

“Once we stripped away the political spin, brushed off budget gimmicks and cut through the bureaucratic jungle, we saw a foundation pillar [the CLASS Act] of the president’s healthcare law for what it really was: truly a Ponzi scheme that apparently was included in the bill solely to help the bill appear deficit-neutral,” Rehberg said.

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