Biden to Dems: GOP offers more of the past, but 'on steroids'

Vice President Joe Biden called out the GOP as a party of "repeal and repeat" Friday in a speech to the Democratic National Committee, and said "reports of the death of the Democratic Party" in the midterms "have been greatly exaggerated."

"This ain't your father's Republican party," he said at the committee's summer meeting in St. Louis. "This is the 'Republican Tea Party.' And as they [voters] focus on that alternative … what they're going to find out is, the choices are pretty stark." 

He criticized two Republican Senate candidates by name, Kentucky's Rand Paul and Nevada's Sharron Angle, as offering no new policy ideas. 

"Where are their alternatives? What has been proposed?" he said. "They offer combination of the old failed policies of the Bush administration and a new set of draconian ideas basically on steroids."

Then, taking an unusual approach, he compared recent Democratic initiatives to those of the Republican Party — in the 1860s and 1950s.

"We did [this legislative term] what good Republicans used to do as far back as Lincoln: We provided seed money," he said of President Obama's emphasis on green technology in the stimulus bill. Biden then compared the push to former President Lincoln's investment in the transcontinental railroad and former President Eisenhower's creation of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency for new military technologies.

"We know the government isn't going to heal the economy," he noted. "It's going to be through the free enterprise system. That's why seed money is so important."   

Biden noted House Minority Leader John Boehner's (R-Ohio) June comment that Democrats' response to the Wall Street crisis — the financial regulatory overhaul — was like "killing an ant with a nuclear weapon."

"Guess what? That's a pretty damn big ant," he said. "It ate up about 8 million jobs."

He concluded by emphasizing a positive outlook for Democrats troubled about November. 

"The last administration had a Ponzi scheme disguised as a vision," he said. "That is what we inherited. ... But they [voters] knew this road would going to be rough."

"Reports of the death of the Democratic Party have been greatly exaggerated," he continued. "Come Nov. 3, there will be a Democratic majority in the House and a Democratic majority in the Senate. That will be the case, and were it not illegal, I'd make book on it."

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