Biden keeps linking McCain to Bush

With no room for gaffes in this crucial state, Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden stayed on script Saturday, hammering Republican rival John McCain for his support of President Bush’s economic and foreign policies.

“Folks,” Biden said in a rally here, “we know we are not running against George W. Bush. But we are running against the Bush economic policies that John and Sarah Palin continue to cling to -- the same politics that pushed Ohio’s unemployment rate to the highest rate in 16 years while pushing down the average income of middle-class Americans $2,000. That’s the reality, ladies and gentlemen.”

The Marion Harding High School gym was nowhere near full -- Biden drew about 500 supporters. But his appearance in this exurban outpost an hour north of Columbus demonstrated that Democrats are fighting hard in the rural and newly developed parts of this state, which helped give Bush his victory in 2004.

Biden, affable and relaxed on the campaign trail, at times strains for folksiness -- his repetition of the phrase “ladies and gentlemen” 10 times in the course of a 20-minute speech can be cloying. He likes to remind supporters he was born in scrappy Scranton, Pa., and had a father who sometimes was out of work. He said his 91-year-old mother would be delighted by a T-shirt he was given Saturday: “Obama, O’Biden, Ohio, ’08.”

Biden’s wife, Jill, a community college teacher who introduced her husband, said he had commuted between Delaware and Washington since he was elected to the Senate in 1972. He began the practice in order to be home for his two small sons after his first wife and baby daughter were killed in a car crash. That commute, Jill Biden said, proves her husband “has never been part of the Washington scene.”

But the candidate did not sell himself as a Washington outsider. Indeed he did not spend much time selling himself at all.

Biden spent most of his speech attacking McCain and linking him to Bush, possibly the most powerful Democratic argument in a state where many working-class white voters remain wary of Obama.

“If you’ve ever had any doubt that John McCain will continue George Bush’s economic policies, just today I watched on the bus coming over here . . . Vice President [Dick] Cheney came out and endorsed John McCain. Folks, if you need more proof . . . “

Biden also mocked his rivals.

“I love it when John McCain and Sarah Palin get up there and they start to call each other ‘maverick.’ To paraphrase [Democratic Pennsylvania Sen.] Bob Casey, ‘You can’t call yourself a maverick when all you’ve been the last eight years is a sidekick.’ . . . McCain and Palin are sidekicks to George Bush’s economic policy.”

Biden drew spirited applause when he decried the Republicans’ negative tone as “Karl Rove’s brand of political tactics.”

“They are calling Barack Obama every name in the book, and ladies and gentlemen, it will probably get worse in the remaining . . . three days,” he said.

“Shame on them!” boomed a man’s voice from the crowd.

“If you look at who Barack Obama is,” Biden said, “if you look at what he’s done, his plans for the country, if you work with us in the closing days -- choosing hope over fear -- after next Tuesday, they will, all of us will, call Barack Obama something else: Mr. President.”

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robin.abcarian@latimes.com