Biden smacks back at McCain on 'luck'
Posted: Monday, October 13, 2008 3:49 PM by Carrie Dann
From NBC/NJ's Mike Memoli
MANCHESTER, NH – As
John McCain tried to put some distance between himself and
Bush,
Joe Biden sought to lump them back together, playing off the Arizona Republican’s speech by saying he’d “double-down on the same risky bet” of the past eight years.
Returning to New Hampshire’s largest city for the first time since his own presidential bid, Biden told a crowd of 900 at Southern New Hampshire University that McCain made an “honest statement” by saying the nation can’t spend four more years “waiting for our luck to change.” And yet, he asked, “What is he proposing differently?”
“When Barack Obama is president we’re not gonna wait for our luck to change,” he said. “We’re gonna change our luck. We’re gonna change this country. In the neighborhood I come from, you make your own luck.”
The Delaware senator echoed some of the economic proposals called for by his running mate today, and said Democrats hope to begin implementing them and others immediately after the election.
“We believe we cannot even wait until January the 20th, when, God willing, we’re sworn in president and vice president,” he said.
Biden said that at the core of every plan Obama has proposed is “jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs.” And in the notoriously tax-averse Granite State, he fought back hard against what he said is one of the “lies of the McCain-Palin campaign” about the tax policy.
“Not one single person making less than $250,000 dollars a year is going to see a single penny increase in their taxes, and 95 percent are going to get a serious tax cut,” he said. “They’re the facts -- 800,000 people here in New Hampshire will get a tax cut.”
Today’s visit was Biden’s second to New Hampshire as his party’s vice presidential nominee. Though he did stump here often as a presidential candidate – about 70 times by one count – he ended up devoting most of his energies to the Iowa caucuses, and dropped out of the race altogether after his poor showing there on January 3rd.
“What have you heard us both say, even when we were competing against each other in this state,” Biden said of he and Obama, “We both have had … unyielding confidence in the grit, determination and patriotism of the American people. Unyielding confidence, so we can get this done.”
