SCRANTON, Pa. - Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden yesterday accused the McCain campaign of trying to distract Americans from their economic woes by launching "unbecoming personal attacks" at Barack Obama.
"It's good to be home!" said the Delaware senator, who was joined on stage by former President Bill Clinton and Sen. Hillary Clinton - the former Democratic presidential candidate who has her own roots in Scranton, where her father grew up and is buried.
Biden said John McCain's campaign is desperate to change the subject from the financial crisis that has wiped out many Americans' college and retirement savings. He said McCain has resorted to making "ugly inferences" about Obama in the waning days of the campaign.
"Every single false charge, every single baseless accusation is a simple attempt to get you to focus on something other than what's affecting your family and your country," said Biden, who was cheered by some 6,000 people packed into a sports arena in the blue-collar city where he lived until he was 10.
In her remarks, Sen. Clinton offered an updated version of an applause line from her own campaign, saying: "It took a Democratic president to clean up after the last President Bush. It's going to take a Democratic president to clean up after this President Bush." (In the primaries, it was "It took a Clinton . . . ")
She then added a new coda: "We've done it before, and we'll do it again. America will once again rise from the ashes of the Bushes."
Obama has been sparing in his use of Bill Clinton as a campaign surrogate, although the former president left Scranton immediately after speaking to campaign for Obama in Virginia, a state, Clinton noted, that had not gone Democratic in a presidential contest for 40 years.
Bill Clinton said his wife had already made 50 appearances on behalf of Obama. "She has not only done more to support him than any runner-up in the Democratic primary process in my lifetime," he said, "she has done more than all the other runners-up combined."
In Virginia later, the former president praised Obama's plan for financial recovery and his proposals for health- care reform, an issue that he said nobody has taken on "since Hillary and I got our brains beat out trying to fix."
In Pennsylvania, Biden defended a comment he made in an ABC interview last month in which he said the wealthiest Americans should show their patriotism by paying more in taxes. His voice rising, the Delaware senator shouted: "It is unpatriotic to take $100 billion offshore and not pay your taxes! That is unpatriotic! So I don't need a lecture on patriotism! I've had it to here!" *
