Joe Biden will deliver a high-profile speech intended as the first attack in a sustained anti-McCain offensive in a new speech called “Bush 44″ he’ll deliver tomorrow in the key battleground state of Michigan.
While the lines of attack have long been drawn—as the title indicates, Biden will assert that a McCain presidency would amount to a third Bush term and will focus on the Republican’s domestic policies and harsh campaign tactics—the new speech will be more detailed, comprehensive and aggressive, a campaign aide told Politico.
Biden will deliver the speech in St. Clair Shores, Mich., which is located in Macomb County—the area whose voters inspired Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg to coin the term “Reagan Democrats.” The RealClearPolitics polling average shows Obama with a 2-point lead in the state, which Democrats won by slim margins in the last two elections.
The speech is touted as matching the aggressive new strategy the Obama campaign has promised to unleash in the remaining days of the campaign to counter the recent poll gains of John McCain and running mate Sarah Palin.
Biden until now has received considerably less media attention than Palin, in part because his speeches have seemed more intended to appeal to crowds than to make news, and the speech seems to be intended to integrate him more into the broader campaign strategy and to use him as a super-surrogate to take high-profile hits at McCain.
The campaign is emphasizing Biden’s unique standing to deliver those hits, based on his longtime relationship with the Arizona senator, stretching back to the early 1970s when McCain served as Biden’s Navy liaison to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Biden gave a taste of this promised new ferocity, which the campaign hopes will translate into increased coverage of its line of attack, during campaign stops in Charlotte, N.C., Sunday.
Recalling how he offered to publicly defend McCain against character attacks during the 2000 primary, Biden told a rally that his friend McCain nonetheless “was then and is now dead wrong … about what we should do as a nation.”
The crowd of 1,100—as verified by the police department—whooped and clapped.
“John just doesn’t get it,” Biden continued. “John’s answer to your health care problems is—seriously, this is not a joke—John wants to, his answer is he’s going to give a tax credit, and the way he’s going to pay for that tax credit is to tax everybody who has health insurance.” The audience booed.
Biden also criticized McCain for voting against legislation to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.
“John doesn’t get it. If he did, he would have voted with [Rep.] Mel [Watt] (D.-N.C) and me when we tried to insure 3.2 million kids,” Biden said as many in the crowd got to their feet clapping. “John voted no! John voted no!”
Biden rapped the McCain-Palin ticket for being out of touch on the economy, and keyed in on women’s sense of economic insecurity.
“John even voted against a study—a study—just to see how big the pay gap was between women and men. A study. Ladies and gentlemen, he wants to continue the trend of this administration,” Biden said, before going on to cite statistics that North Carolina women are more likely than men to be paid just the minimum wage and to live in poverty, and make on average 82 cents for each dollar a man is paid for the same job.
Biden also took aim at McCain’s foreign policy judgment at a fundraiser earlier in the afternoon at the home of Crandall Bowles, wife of former Clinton chief of staff Erskine Bowles.
“On foreign policy there’s not only not any real difference” between Bush and McCain, Biden told a group of about 60 supporters, but “the difference that exists is even more troublesome. More troublesome [is] how John views Iran.”
While Bush sent his top negotiator to Iran, McCain doesn’t want to talk to them, Biden said. “Because we have a naked self-interest in avoiding a war, John, that’s why,” Biden said.
Biden put the blame for what he called Republicans’ “scurrilous lies” about his running mate squarely on McCain, saying that “the very people I said I would testify against [on behalf of] John McCain in South Carolina in the [2000] primary are the very people he’s hired to run this campaign.”
Next Monday, Biden will deliver another high-profile speech, this one a critique of McCain’s foreign-policy views.