Vice President Joe Biden hosted law enforcement and first responders at the historic residence provided to vice presidents, but he couldn’t keep the class warfare and partisan politics out of the event.
Biden made a personal attack on budget hawks who oppose first responder spending. “It used to be you were among the last to go, now you’re the first to go,” he told the group, according to the pool reporter, before describing the budget cuts as “kind of pernicious. It’s a perfect storm out there.”
Though an official event, the meeting has some campaign value as the first-responder unions nationwide tend to overwhelmingly support Democrats.
“They walked away because they didn’t like the way we were paying for it,” the vice president told the officers — in an apparent allusion to the tax increases that Senate Republicans opposed last year. ”
Biden then derided the rich — who, he seems to think, don’t want robust law enforcement. “The first guy who’s going to have a problem is the guy whose $3 million home is on fire and you can’t get a truck out there,” he said. “The first guy that’s going to have a problem is the person who has real assets and finds their house burglarized or robbed, or their Porsche is stolen.”
“I’m not very subtle,” the vice president added. “I find it absolutely beyond my understanding.”
