Vice President Joe Biden turned a dinner speech to Florida Democrats
at Walt Disney World into a pep rally Friday night, blasting Republicans
as obstructionists with whom he said the administration can no longer
work.
Biden knocked Republicans for blocking President Obama‘s American Jobs Act, for “playing roulette” with the federal deficit ceiling and standing in the way of other Obama initiatives, from Wall Street reform to health-care reform to the end of the Iraq occupation.
Biden said he and Obama tried for 2 1/2 years to sit down with Republicans and now he
concludes, “This is not your father’s Republican Party.” “It’s time to stand up. It’s time to fight back,” Biden bellowed to a cheering crowd of more than 1,000 people at the Florida Democratic Party annual convention at Disney’s Contemporary Resort. “We are looking for this fight.”
Paraphrasing President Franklin Roosevelt‘s attacks on his Republican critics in the 1930s, Biden belittled House Speaker John Boehner, House Minority Leader Eric Cantor and Senate President Mitch McConnell as “a beautiful rhythm of obstructionists, Boehner, Cantor and Mitch.”
Biden accused Republicans of creating the very budget deficits that they campaign against, and of not understanding that their tax-cuts proposals and vow to kill health-care reform would make the budget situation worse.
“That’s what I find absolutely bizarre: Republicans moralizing about deficits. That’s like an arsonist moralizing about fire safety,” he said. “These guys have zero credibility.”
The Democrats also heard from Democratic National Committee Chairman Debbie
Wasserman Schultz — who said they need to shout Obama’s accomplishments, such as tax cuts, “from the rooftops” — and from U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, who faces re-election, declaring, “I’m ready for the fight again.”
The Republican Party of Florida lashed back before Biden’s speech, saying that Democrats like Biden blame the American people for their own failures.
“We Republicans know that the blame lies with failed Washington policies that take too much of our money and infringe on our freedoms,” said RPOF Chairman Lenny Curry. “We offer a positive alternative to the Democrats’ pessimism.”
Earlier in the evening, Biden also addressed nearly 1,000 educators at the annual convention of the Florida Education Association — the state’s biggest teachers union. His message to them was similar, though a bit softer, saying that Republicans are not bad people, just wrong.
“They don’t think that public education is salvageable,” and are not interested in
making “investments to make it what we know it can be.”
Biden attended with his wife, Jill Biden, who has been a teacher for more than 30 years, and still teaches full time, at a community college in Virginia. She wooed the teachers with stories of her classroom experience, while the vice president roused them with calls for union strength.
Biden said Republicans had sold the public the message that teachers and their union are responsible for bad schools.
“Folks, this is one of the biggest scams in modern American history,” he said. “They’re using you to launch the most direct assault on labor, not just in my lifetime, but since the ’20s.”