Obama’s re-election bid: Choice or referendum?
Two prominent politicos went on television today to offer very different frames for the 2012 president election,
For Vice President Biden, voters next year will have “a clear choice” between a president who has improved a bad economy and Republicans who try to block him at every stop.
“Here is what we’re for and here’s what they’re getting in the way of us being able to do,” Biden said on CNN’s State of the Union. “And if we continue to do what we’re doing, it will continue to get better.”
For Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the election will be a referendum on Obama’s performance in office, amid a slowing economy and an unemployment rate that has hit 9.1%.
The Democrats “got everything they wanted from Congress the first two years,” McConnell said, also on CNN. “Their policies are in place. And they are demonstrably not working.”
Biden said the Obama administration inherited a collapsing economy from the George W. Bush presidency and rescued it from a potential depression. The vice president said that without the 2009 stimulus bill, “we would be in a position now where we would be in a double dip recession some time ago.”
Yet the Republicans are now blocking the Obama jobs bill, just as they blocked a major debt reduction effort over the summer, Biden said, referring specifically to the Tea Party Republicans.
“This is not your normal Republican Party,” Biden said. “It doesn’t mean it’s good or bad. It’s a different Republican Party in the House of Representatives … And until we get a Republican Party, it’s going to be hard to figure out who can we compromise with.”