WASHINGTON
(Reuters) - Vice President Joe Biden told
a campaign rally on Tuesday that the middle class has
been buried for the past four years, just longer than President
Barack Obama's time in the White House.
Republicans
immediately seized on what they termed a "stunning admission" by
Biden as evidence that Obama's policies have been bad for the economy, the day
before Obama and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney meet
in their first presidential debate.
Discussing
what the Obama
campaign contends are
Romney's plans to raise taxes on most Americans to fund tax cuts for the
wealthy, Biden made his comment in an emotional speech to a crowd in Charlotte,
North Carolina.
"This
is deadly earnest. How they can justify ... raising taxes on the middle class
that has been buried the last four years? How in the Lord's name can they
justify raising their taxes and these tax cuts?" he asked.
"We've
seen this movie before - massive tax cuts for the wealthy, eliminating
restrictions on Wall Street, let the banks write their own rules. We know where
it ends. It ends in the catastrophe of the middle class and the Great Recession
of 2008. Folks, we cannot go back to that. The president and I have a different
way forward," Biden said.
Voters say
the struggling U.S. economy is the most important issue in the election, and
Obama's Democrats and Romney's Republicans have been jockeying over who would
be better economic stewards for average Americans.
"Under
President Obama, the middle class has suffered from crushing unemployment,
rising prices and falling incomes," Amanda Henneberg, a Romney
spokeswoman, said in a statement.
"Vice
President Biden, just today, said that the middle class, over the last four
years, has been 'buried.' We agree," Romney's running mate, Paul Ryan,
told supporters at a campaign event in Iowa.
Obama's
campaign fired back that Romney's camp was making a "desperate and
out-of-context attack."
"As the
vice president has been saying all year and again in his remarks today, the
middle class was punished by the failed (former President
George W.) Bush policies that crashed our economy - and a vote for Mitt
Romney and Paul Ryan is a return to those failed policies," campaign
spokeswoman Lis Smith said in a statement.
The U.S.
presidential election is November 6.
(Editing by
Cynthia Osterman and Stacey Joyce)
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