Vice President Joe Biden said Thursday that voters have to put Hillary Clinton in the White House or the whole country will suffer.
“As my grandfather used to say, with the grace of God, the good will of the neighbors and the crick not rising, you’re going to elect Hillary Clinton president, because if you don’t, we’re in trouble,” he told an audience at the Center for American Progress, a liberal-leaning Washington think tank.
“I could summarize my whole presentation this morning by saying: Read your report and make sure on Jan. 21, we’re saying ‘Madame President,'” he added.
He was referring to a new report from the group that said America’s middle class is finally seeing real economic gains after being hit hard by the 2008 financial crisis, stagnant wages and rising costs. It called on Congress to raise the minimum wage and lower major expenses such as child care, higher education, housing and retirement.
Biden said the Republican Party has abandoned its commitment to help middle-class families, and said the GOP and Democrats see the federal government’s role much differently.
Democrats, he said, believe that when the middle class is growing, “we have social and political stability.”
“When the middle class does well, the wealthy do very, very well and the poor have a chance,” he said.
The Obama administration, he argued, has looked out for the middle class since taking office in the middle of the financial crisis, when jobs were leaving the economy at an alarming rate and “there was talk of another depression.”
“Everybody forgets how bad things were,” he said, recalling how the U.S. economy lost more than 800,000 jobs in January alone, the month he and Obama took office, and how the president made the decision to bail out the auto industry and infuse the economy with $831 billion over the course of just 18 months. Republicans, he said, opposed the stimulus funds and most opposed spending billions to help out the auto industry.
“Republicans talked about stimulus like it was a dirty word,” he said. “… Republicans accepted that the U.S. auto industry was going to whither, arguing that the federal government had no role to play, that we would never sell 6 million cars again, that Americans workers were being paid too much — it sounds like Donald Trump.”
In the end, Biden argued, the administration helped save 1 million jobs in the auto industry and helped create another 671,000 at General Motors and Chrysler “as they came out of bankruptcy.”
And, somehow, “it was a failure? We made a mistake as Mr. Trump and others have said?” he asked.
The Republican Party also doesn’t support plans to help send more students to community colleges, help lower child care costs for working families and make healthcare more affordable through Obamacare. He said the GOP wants to “privatize Medicaid” and “cut Social Security.”
“This is not your father’s Republican Party,” he said. “They’ve reverted to attitudes that have been jettisoned in the 1940s by their party.”
