PHILADELPHIA — President Joe Biden‘s first public appearance since he called former President Donald Trump‘s supporters “garbage” was before a friendly crowd in Pennsylvania.
In a Philadelphia union hall Friday, Biden, who this week caused political problems for Vice President Kamala Harris‘s campaign to succeed him in the White House, tried to make amends with one of the commonwealth’s key constituencies, labor workers, before next week’s election.
Biden repeatedly mentioned Harris’s name as he underscored the importance of American Rescue Plan’s Butch Lewis Emergency Pension Relief Act, which protected the pensions of 1.2 million union workers, according to a new Department of Labor report. That includes 29,000 United Food and Commercial Workers International Union workers and retirees, primarily in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey.
Biden also took the opportunity to present a citizen’s medal to Lewis’s widow, Rita Lewis. Butch Lewis, retired head of Teamsters Local 100 in Evendale, Ohio, died in 2016.
Despite being difficult to understand at times, Biden appeared to be appreciated by the audience at United Association Local 692 Sprinklerfitters, which chanted multiple times, “Thank you, Joe!”
“You shouldn’t have to thank anybody,” Biden said. “For years and years, you worked.”
Although Biden was charitable toward Wall Street and big corporations, he was less charitable toward Trump and Republicans, reminding those in attendance that the former president would cross a picket line. He was also not charitable regarding critics of his economy after this week’s economic data, including October’s inflation report.
“‘Biden’s going to get elected, there’s going to be a recession.’ Give me a break,” he said of his detractors.
Regardless of this week, Biden remains popular with certain demographic groups, according to Northeastern University political science professor Costas Panagopoulos, including white, blue-collar workers with whom Harris has struggled to appeal.
“Strategically deployed, [Biden] can be an effective surrogate for Harris,” Panagopoulos told the Washington Examiner.
In addition to Friday’s event in Philadelphia’s suburbs, Biden will visit his hometown of Scranton in northeast Pennsylvania, another blue-collar area of the commonwealth that is poised to decide next Tuesday’s election, on Saturday.
However, for Brookings Institution’s former Vice President and Director of Governance studies, Darrell West, Biden’s mistakes complicate things for Harris, who is trying to distance herself from the president, four days before the polls close because she has to respond.
For example, as a majority of polling respondents tell pollsters they consider the country to be heading in the wrong direction, Harris has been asked multiple times how her administration would be different from that of Biden. Biden’s average approval is net negative 16 percentage points, and an average of 37% of polling respondents consider the country to be on the right track, according to RealClearPolitics.
During her closing argument address on the Ellipse this week, Harris told a crowd of 75,000 people that she was honored to have been Biden’s vice president but promised to bring her own experiences and ideas to her administration.
“My presidency will be different because the challenges we face are different,” she said. “Our top priority as a nation four years ago was to end the pandemic and rescue the economy. Now, our biggest challenge is to lower costs, costs that were rising even before the pandemic and that are still too high. I get it.”
However, as Biden casts a shadow over her campaign because of his record, he cut a darker figure this week after he responded to a comedian who joked last weekend during Trump’s Madison Square Rally that Puerto Rico is a “floating island of garbage.” During a campaign call with Latino advocacy organization Voto Latino, which concluded moments before Harris’s Ellipse speech, Biden said, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”
Amid a Republican uproar that Biden was referring to all of Trump’s supporters as “garbage,” the White House press aides shared with reporters an edited transcript prepared by career, apolitical federal employees that read “supporter’s” not “supporters.” The head of the stenography office told their counterparts in the press office that the decision to change the transcript without consulting them was “a breach of protocol and spoilation of transcript integrity.”
“Our Stenography Office transcript — released to our distro, which includes the National Archives — is now different than the version edited and released to the public by Press Office staff,” the supervisor wrote in an email obtained by the Associated Press.
Republicans, including House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY) and House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-KY), want to investigate the matter as trust in the Biden White House remains low.
The stenographers’s criticism created another news cycle about Biden’s garbage comments, encouraging scrutiny of how the White House, including Harris, has attempted to minimize concerns about the president’s age and mental acuity before he dramatically suspended his campaign this summer and endorsed the vice president as his replacement.
“Ideally, he will stay in the background over the next few days so she can argue she really is turning the page,” West told the Washington Examiner. “With his low approval ratings, his involvement in her campaign is not a positive.”
Trump holds an average 0.4 point lead over Harris in Pennsylvania, which has 19 electoral votes, according to RealClearPolitics.