Obama on Friday will embark on a concentrated one-day fundraising trip, with a stop in his hometown of Chicago and another in Atlanta for a big-draw event with film producer Tyler Perry and performer Cee Lo Green.
In his first major campaign address, Biden called out Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich on Thursday for their failure to support the US auto industry bailout, which the White House says ended up saving 1.4 million jobs during the ravaging economic downturn that began with the near economic collapse in the final months of the George W. Bush administration.
It was the first of four general election events the vice president will hold in the coming weeks aimed at drawing a sharper contrast between Obama and his Republican rivals.
“If you give any one of these guys the keys to the White House, they will bankrupt the middle class,” Biden said at a United Auto Workers hall in politically crucial Ohio, a heavily populated swing state.
The speech focused on the economy at a time when signs of a sustained recovery have strengthened Obama’s standing and led Republicans to stray from the economic message into deeply divisive social issues like contraception.
“Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich have a fundamentally different vision,” Biden said. “We’re about promoting the private sector. They’re about protecting the privileged sector.”
With Biden fully engaged in the campaign, the Obama re-election team sees an opportunity to rely on a strong and forceful defender of the president to build support among Democrats, while allowing Obama himself to stay above the political fray for as long as possible.
But many of the events Obama has held in recent months, which the White House has said are “official,” have had the flavor of campaign events, including references, without naming them, to the Republican candidates vying to replace him. That goes for a speech Obama delivered Thursday in Maryland, fighting back against Republican criticism of his energy record.
“A lot of the folks who are running for a certain office who shall go unnamed, they’ve been talking down new sources of energy,” Obama told a crowd of students.
“They dismiss wind power. They dismiss solar power. They make jokes about biofuels. They were against raising fuel standards. I guess they like gas-guzzlers,” he said.
Republican candidates have criticized the recent sharp rise in gas prices in the final months of Obama’s first term.
In a Fox News interview shortly before Obama spoke, Romney said the president should “absolutely” be held responsible for high gasoline prices because “he has not pursued policies that convince the world that America is going to become energy secure, energy independent.”
Romney, who has struggled to win over his party’s conservative base and solidify his front-runner status, is striving to redirect the Republican debate back to economic issues.
With the state-by-state primary race ever more chaotic, Romney still holds a huge lead in delegates to the Republican national nominating convention in August But he is in danger of being unable to amass the 1,144 delegates needed to assure him of the nomination before the convention opens, and that could lead to a politically bloody battle that would further weaken whichever candidate emerges.
With no primary too minor, the former Massachusetts governor travels to Puerto Rico on Friday ahead of the Sunday vote there.
Santorum, bolstered by big primary victories in Alabama and Mississippi on Tuesday, stormed into Puerto Rico on Wednesday. But he may have hurt his chances in the largely Spanish-speaking island when he told a newspaper interviewer that English would have to be the “main language” if the US territory were to become a state.
Santorum was forced to repeatedly clarify his remarks, which already cost the support of one statehood backer who had signed on as a Santorum delegate.
“I never said only English should be spoken here. Never did I even intimate that,” the former senator Santorum told local reporters. “What I said was that English had to be spoken as well as other — obviously Spanish is going to be spoken, this would be a bilingual country.”
Spanish and English are the official languages of the island commonwealth.
In another sign of the fissures in the Republican ranks, candidate Ron Paul refused Thursday to commit to backing Romney if the former Massachusetts governor becomes the party’s nominee for president.
An anti-war candidate, Paul said he’d need more information about Romney’s international agenda to make that decision.
Paul has pursued a strategy focused on caucus states, but he trails Romney, Santorum and Gingrich in the presidential race and has yet to win any of the states that have already voted. Paul so far has earned just 48 delegates.
Paul shied away from naming any of his rivals but suggested they all want to plunge the US deeper into military conflicts in the Middle East.
Obama will attend two fundraisers Friday in Chicago and three in Atlanta. In Atlanta, his campaign’s African American Leadership Council is holding a gala at Perry’s studio featuring Green’s performance. General admission tickets are $500. VIP tickets range from $2,500 to $10,000. A dinner later at Perry’s home will raise $35,800 per guest.
The Obama team on Thursday also rolled out a 17-minute documentary on his first term, “The Road We’ve Traveled,” shown to Democratic Party offices and local Obama headquarters. It is narrated by Tom Hanks, and is sure to be a centerpiece of the Democratic National Convention coverage in prime time TV.
In Ohio, Biden directed much of his fire at Romney, singling him out for saying the government should let the auto industry go bankrupt and that a bailout would turn the car companies into the “living dead.”
“Gov. Romney’s predictions of a living dead? We have now living proof: a million jobs saved, 200,000 new jobs created,” Biden said as the crowd of about 500 erupted in cheers.
Biden is expected to target the big three political battlegrounds — Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. Obama carried all three in 2008, but will face an uphill climb in each come November given the toll the recession has taken on those states.
The campaign’s goal is to use the vice president’s strengths to counteract Obama’s perceived weaknesses.
The president sometimes struggles to connect with white working-class voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Some Jewish voters, who make up a core constituency for Florida Democrats, view him with skepticism. Biden has built deep ties to both groups during his four decades in national politics, connections that could make a difference.
As a long-serving member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden cemented his reputation as an unyielding supporter of Israel. And his upbringing in a working-class Catholic family from Scranton, Pennsylvania, gives the vice president a valuable political intangible: empathy with the struggles of blue-collar Americans.
