YATESVILLE — The audience at Pittston Area High School had an indelible message for their guest speaker Sunday night.
“Run, Joe, run!” they loudly chanted as former vice president and fellow Democrat Joe Biden took the stage, urging him to seek the nation’s highest office in 2020.
Biden did not take up the gauntlet, but offered an indelible message in return: Concentrate on sending more Democrats to Congress in 2018.
“The very character of our country is on the ballot, and all the world is looking,” Biden said of Tuesday’s general election.
“We are in a battle for America’s soul, and I really mean it,” he added.
Biden isn’t running for anything himself — at least not yet, despite his own continued ruminations and vocal prodding from some within his own party. His visit here was in support of U.S. Sen. Bob Casey and Rep. Matt Cartwright, incumbent Lackawanna County Democrats who spoke before the Scranton-born Biden came to the podium on Sunday.
Their Republican challengers — U.S. Rep. Lou Barletta and congressional hopeful John Chrin, respectively — received their own boost from current Vice President Mike Pence during an Oct. 24 rally in Forty Fort.
Still hoarse after a Harrisburg rally earlier Sunday evening, Biden took the stage shortly after 8 p.m. as part of a campaign tour that has taken him to 22 states on behalf of 63 candidates, “as you can tell by my voice,” the 75-year-old Scranton native said, adding that he has visited 15 different towns and cities in the past six days.
“It’s good to be almost home,” said Biden, who grew up in Scranton’s Green Ridge section before his father moved the family to Delaware in search of work in the 1950s.
Policies in focus
Focusing on the needs of working Americans — including unionized employees — was a key theme Sunday night, with Biden warning that the Trump administration is engaged in an “attack on organized labor.”
State Sen. John Yudichak, D-Nanticoke, among the first speakers, appealed to the party’s blue collar roots.
“Working class Democrats built this party,” he said, warning that “health care, education and jobs are at stake.”
Cartwright painted a picture of the party’s social values and causes it has championed, including the needs of senior citizens and the disabled, clean air and water, fair wages and cost-of-living adjustments, Medicare and Social Security.
“Who got the kids out of the mines? Who stood for civil rights, women’s rights, LGBT rights,” Cartwright asked.
“When the needle moves, who moves the needle? Democrats,” he thundered.
If he and the Democrats take back control of Congress on Tuesday, “Job 1” should be “a real infrastructure bill,” Cartwright added, and not “one of those phony baloney” plans in which the federal government picks up only 20 percent of the cost — a clear attack on President Donald Trump’s various infrastructure proposals, none of which have come anywhere near the half-trillion-dollar plan he frequently touted on the campaign trail in 2016.
Biden also took up that theme on Sunday.
“Since when are Republicans against infrastructure,” he said, lamenting that the U.S. lags many other countries in investment that area.
For lack of spending there, and deep potential cuts to social programs, Biden placed blame using one of the colorful old-school adjectives that have long been his stock in trade.
“It’s their cockamamie tax bill,” he said, telling the audience that a Republican-controlled Senate will gut health care and Social Security to pay down the deficits they created by giving tax breaks to the rich.
“I promise you,” Biden said. “I think I know the Senate better than anyone living, because I spent so much time there.”
“You need both of them there,” he said of Casey and Cartwright. “You desperately need them there to keep this from happening.”
Casey, who spoke immediately before Biden, said his race has been defined by “one big issue, and that is health care.”
He said that Democratic policies have helped bring health care to 30,360 people in Luzerne County and 20,264 in Lackawanna County, reminding the audience that it was his party that made such gains possible through Obamacare, formally known as the Affordable Care Act.
“We had the guts and determination to pass the Affordable Care Act,” Casey said.
“This is without a doubt the most important midterm election of my entire life, and we have so much at stake,” Casey said.
Civility in focus
The night’s other big theme was civility in politics. While no one attacked Donald Trump by name, the president and his administration came in for a drubbing.
Biden, who spoke for a little more than 20 minutes, raised the spectre of Charlottesville, Va., where white supremacists clashed with anti-fascist demonstrators last year, with one woman dying after being run down by a car.
He took indirect aim at Trump, who said following the incident that there were “some very fine people” on both sides.
“This is the same sort of hateful bile we heard on the streets of Europe in the 1930s,” Biden said.
“Among Democrats, Republicans, independents, there is an insatiable desire for men and women of character to occupy high public office,” he added.
“This is not your father’s Republican party,” said Biden, lamenting that the country had been built on “fairness, decency, respect, equality and giving every one of God’s children a fair shot.”
Biden, whose voice nearly faded at times, rose to a fever pitch as he wrapped up the night.
He told the audience that America remains best poised to lead the world in the 21st century, and that while our country has a mighty military, highly productive workforce and top-notch research universities, China would quickly trade places as it lacks many of the necessary resources and is choking its own people with pollution.
“Remember who in the Hell we are,” Biden shouted. “This is America. We can take it back.”
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