Republicans wasted little time this afternoon pouncing on a less-than-elegant turn of phrase by Joe Biden at a campaign stop in Charlotte today.
The National Journal explains:
While attempting to make the point that Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney would raise taxes on the middle class if he is elected, Biden told a crowd of about 1,000 people, “This is deadly earnest. How they can justify, 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? We’ve seen this movie before …”
The Romney campaign pounced on the comment with a statement saying that the middle class has been “buried” by policies put in place by President Obama in his first term, including being “buried under more and more debt … buried under falling incomes … buried under high unemployment.”
Team Obama quickly responded with a statement seeking to clarify what Biden meant. “As the vice president has been saying all year, and again in his remarks today, the middle class was punished by the failed Bush policies that crashed our economy—and a vote for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan is a return to those failed policies.”
