Vice President Joe Biden arrived in Norfolk Tuesday to talk about the high cost of a college education and to bolster President Obama’s aggressive push to win over middle-class voters in a swing state considered critical to the president’s re-election effort.
At a Norfolk high school, Biden spoke at length about the challenges families face educating their children, echoing a populist message on which Obama has recently focused in other battleground states. Biden talked of his and Obama’s humble beginnings to strike a contrast with the president’s likely foe in the fall, Republican front-runner Mitt Romney, and to paint the administration as an ally of working families. “I always get criticized for being ‘Middle Class Joe,’ which I’m proud of. And I always talk about the middle class. It’s more than that,” Biden said. “When the middle class is not growing, everybody suffers. It is the backbone of America.”
Numerous trips across the Potomac in recent months by Obama and his surrogates have helped improve the president’s standing in a state he won in 2008 but where his popularity has since waned. After opening 10 campaign offices and launching initiatives targeting women and young voters, Obama leads Romney in Virginia 50 percent to 42 percent, a recent Quinnipiac University poll shows.
But Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus brushed off Obama’s efforts in Virginia.
“He will abandon the state of Virginia by the time we get to October because it’s going to be out of reach,” Priebus said. “Just because the president is using taxpayer money every day to go into Virginia, don’t make the conclusion that Republicans aren’t doing the work.”
Obama was the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry Virginia in half a century, though the state has moved to the political right since 2008, electing a Republican governor, three more Republican congressmen and a near-majority in the General Assembly.
During his appearance, Biden said higher education is crucial to the economic recovery given the rise of high-tech industries.
“If we can give banks and other people breaks on what we’ve done for them to help bail them out,” Biden said, “seems to me we ought to help in these economic times parents who are helping you pay these [college] loans and for you all.”
Gov. Bob McDonnell rebutted Biden, telling reporters that the vice president is talking about higher education to “change the subject” away from more urgent issues, like the economy.
“If I had an 8 percent unemployment rate,” McDonnell said, “I’d be talking about something else too.”
