Watertown, N.Y.
At rally for Democratic congressional candidate Bill Owens this morning, Vice President Joe Biden attacked conservative Doug Hoffman as the lackey of national conservatives, whom Biden blamed for causing this "God awful recession." It's hard to imagine Hoffman being able "to take issue with any issue Rush Limbaugh took. I'm being serious about this. I'm being deadly honest about it," Biden said. "I surely know what they're against, but I don't know what they're for," he said later of Republicans and Hoffman, "but I suspect I know what they're for because I know what Bush and Cheney were for."
There are signs that Biden may be a toothless attack dog. He was only able to fill a small venue to about 60 percent of its capacity, and a new poll released by Siena college this morning shows that Biden is not popular in the district. The vice president's favorable rating is only +4 (41-37 percent); Hoffman's favorable rating is +14 (47-33 percent).
And then there was the content of the speech itself. The vice president's 35-minute speech meandered through childhood recollections -- such as his lifeguarding on Lake Ontario and watching his father leaving Scranton to look for a job in Wilmington -- and attacks on Republicans.
Biden lit into Republicans for not doing anything about global warming, but one of liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava's few conservative positions was opposition to job-killing cap and trade. And as gas prices have begun to rise, Biden decided to pick a fight with Sarah Palin over drilling for oil. "Sarah Palin thinks the answer to energy was 'Drill, Baby, Drill,'" Biden said. "No, it's a lot more complicated, Sarah," Biden said. Palin fired back on Facebook.
As the unemployment number creeps ever higher, Biden affirmed that the unemployment rate is the key indicator of economic success. Democratic candidate Bill Owens is "not going to measure the success of this government based upon whether or not the GDP is growing," Biden said. "The measure of success is not whether the stock market's up to 16,000," or whether or not "the GDP grows at 6 percent."
At the end of his speech, the vice president offered this, well, Bidenesque endorsement of Owens: "This guy is a good man. As we Irish say, the best compliment you can ever give any man or woman is to say, 'He's a good man.'"
Though Republican Dede Scozzafava recorded robocalls for Owens and campaigned in person with him last night, Owens will need all the help he can get to win as a generic Democrat in a district Barack Obama won by five points last year.
