Out on the campaign trail, President Obama and his allies may be directing much of their fire at the Chamber of Commerce with baseless allegations of foreign influence, but Vice President Joe Biden hasn’t forgotten the old Obama playbook. After nearly two years of the Obama administration, and nearly four years of Democratic control of Congress, Biden is loudly blaming the country’s problems on George W. Bush.
“Folks, people are angry — they’re angry, I’m angry,” Biden told the audience at a Democratic fundraiser at the Wisconsin Club in Milwaukee Friday night. “I am truly angry as I go around the country watching…people absolutely, fundamentally blown away by the greed and the policies of the last eight years, of the last administration.” (Biden had to quickly amend his reference to the “last eight years,” of course, because his party has been in control for a significant portion of that time.)
Biden is also making discredited claims against Bush. According to pool reports, at a Democratic fundraiser in Pittsburgh Monday, Biden said the economy had created 860,000 private-sector jobs in the last nine months and “that is more jobs than the Bush administration created in eight years.” In fact, the Bush administration created about two million new jobs — net — during its eight years in office. That record, certainly nothing to brag about, began in a recession with the bursting of the dot-com bubble and ended in the current recession. And Biden is not only wrong on the numbers, he is even more wrong when one does an apples-to-apples comparison of net job creation during the Bush and Obama administrations. Obama’s record, so far, is of net job loss. In the president’s defense, he came into office during a terrible recession, but that doesn’t excuse false claims about job creation.
In another fundraiser the same day in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Biden referred to the Bush administration at least eight times, according to pool reports. And of a fundraiser in Springfield, Missouri on October 7, the pool report said simply, “Biden blamed many of the country’s problems on the George Bush administration…”
In the first months of the Obama administration, the president and his aides were famous for blaming their problems on Bush. As time has passed, Obama himself has made fewer specific references to his predecessor and has increasingly directed his attacks on the current Republican leadership. But in Joe Biden’s world, it’s still all Bush, all the time.
