'Most scurrilous campaign in history?'
Posted: Wednesday, October 15, 2008 4:16 PM by Domenico Montanaro
Filed Under:
Joe Biden
From NBC/NJ's Mike Memoli
LANCASTER, Ohio -- In recent weeks, Biden has called McCain and his campaign “angry” and “erratic.” Now, maybe it’s cartoonish.
The Delaware senator referred to an editorial cartoon in today's edition of the local newspaper, the Eagle Gazette, as he criticized his Republican rivals’ efforts to tie Obama to William Ayers. It showed Palin telling McCain that Obama “pals around with a terrorist,” as the two ignore men jumping from the ledge of a bank.
“I think it best captures anything I have seen,” Biden said of the spoof. “While the economy is going to hell in a handbasket, while people are losing their jobs, while things are going under, they’re running the most scurrilous campaign in modern history trying to [smear] a decent, honorable man raised by his grandparents and his mother who worked his way up, who fought in a way that few people have to fight to make something of himself.”
The visual aid helped Biden wake up a subdued crowd here, which numbered in the low hundreds for the outdoor “community gathering” at Ohio University’s Lancaster campus. Biden blamed the Republicans’ “erratic” turn to the fact that McCain had nothing new to offer the country, which he said is uniformly looking for answers to practical problems.
“This is the ultimate job application, man,” Biden said. “This is the ultimate, ultimate job interview. And that’s what it’s about. People aren’t looking for a lot of extraneous malarkey. They’re looking for, what are you going to do, guys. What are you going to do to change my circumstance?”
If that argument sounds familiar, it is. Followers of Hillary Clinton will recall that she asked her audiences to think of their vote as a “hiring decision.”
