EMAIL DETAILS

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Vice President
Internal Transcript April 11, 2012


REMARKS BY VICE PRESIDENT JOSEPH BIDEN
AT A FUNDRAISER FOR SENATOR AMY KLOBUCHAR

Hilton Minneapolis
Minneapolis, Minnesota


12:10 P.M. CDT

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Thank you all so very much. It's an honor to be back here in Minnesota, and it's great to be here with an old friend and someone I admire as much as anyone I've ever served with in my life, Vice President Mondale.

When I -- it's now public knowledge, when the President first asked me to consider being Vice President, and he said he needed an answer right away, I told him honestly -- I said, no, thank you. I don't want to be Vice President. I'll do anything I can to help you, Barack, but I don't want to be Vice President.

He said, how much time do you need to think about it? (Laughter.) I said, I don't need any time. I can tell you now. And he said, well, please -- he said, go home and talk with your family about it, and then get back to me as soon as you can.

I went home and talked to my family about it, but I called Fritz Mondale. I called Fritz Mondale to ask his advice about it, and what he thought I should do because I -- like Fritz, I suspect -- never, ever aspired to be Vice President. I had a -- I loved the United States Senate, and I had at least convinced myself I was able to make some difference in that small place.

And I sat with -- I didn't sit -- at the time sit with him, I had a long talk with him, and then he offered to come and sit down with me, and he did. And I asked him if I were to do this, if I were to be asked what should I know and what should I do? What should be, in effect -- it's going to sound the wrong way -- the conditions upon which I would take the job?


And Fritz laid out for me literally a blueprint as to what I should do and say in the discussion, and he is the reason why -- actually the reason why is ultimately how -- if I worked my whole life in the civil rights movement, how I was going to when the first man to be able to assume that chair asked me to help, how was I going to say no? But it was Fritz who gave me the guidance.

Afterwards, after accepting the nomination, I went back to Fritz again, and he came to see me in "his house," and I had never gotten as cogent and as concise a bit of advice that has served I hope the President well, as well. You may recall those of you who have been around a few times, know that I was -- I've had the distinction of being -- served with eight Presidents, and I think it's fair to say that with the possible exception of Mondale and Carter, there's not a single time you can recall you haven't heard one single moment of dissension written about or talked about between the President of the United States and me. We've become good friends.

In large part, it has to do with the sage advice that the Vice President gave me as to how I should conduct myself and how I could best serve the President because as Fritz pointed out, you have one purpose as Vice President is to serve the President -- is to serve the President. And it's been an honor doing that. But if I have done it at all with any degree of confidence it's because of the advice you gave, Fritz.

And one of the first things that we did was recommend that I meet with a group of -- you should know this about your Vice President -- I met with a group of legal experts and academic scholars on the vice presidency. Believe it or not, there are people who specialize in that. (Laughter.) And they were nine who came to see me in the first year within -- my chief of staff, Ron Klain, set it up. And he had been the chief of staff for Al Gore.

And they sat there and they -- all differing political philosophies, representing all parts of the country, and they said the model for the modern Vice President was Fritz Mondale, and that is literally, literally true. So, Fritz, it's an honor to be with you.

And as, Amy, we used to say in the old-fashioned days of the Senate, if you forgive me a point of personal privilege, I'd like to make one other point. I owe Minnesota a great deal, and there's no reason any of you would know this.

But I got elected in 1972 as a 29-year-old kid. The first time I met Fritz, I walked into a Democratic caucus before I turned 30 as the senator-elect, not eligible to be sworn in. And I met -- and I'd met before because they'd helped me before, Hubert Humphrey, who I always called Boss, and Fritz Mondale; and shortly thereafter seeing them in that meeting, my wife and daughter were killed in an automobile accident. They were broadsided by a tractor trailer. My wife was killed. My daughter was killed. And my two sons were very badly injured and hospitalized, and I had no intention of coming to the Senate. And I contacted the Majority Leader, a man who had more integrity in his little finger than most people have in their whole body, Mike Mansfield. And I told him I wasn't going to be coming. My brother was talking to the governor to pick a replacement for me. And that's when Fritz Mondale and Hubert Humphrey -- actually I think it's called an intervention. (Laughter.) And I mean this sincerely, they -- it would be an exaggeration to say they saved my life, but they saved my sanity. They saved my sanity.

So again, I know it's personal and maybe not even appropriate to say, but I owe the people of Minnesota for sending two such great, great, great, great public servants. You haven't seen the like of them in a long time, and I'm not sure you will for a much longer time, as good as some of the people are today -- truly rare, rare public servants. (Applause.)

The one thing -- one thing that Senator Humphrey used to -- he'd come by my office, and he'd sit on the couch to console me, and he'd start crying. And I'd be the one saying, it's okay, it's okay, Mr. Vice President. (Laughter.) It's all right.

But they have hearts as big as their heads, and I've appreciated it, and my whole family has.

And what a team you have in the Senate now. Al Franken -- you know when Al was running, and that long wait, roughly six months to decide who was going to occupy that seat when it was pretty clear at the outset in my view, that's my personal view, and all the talk about, would this be a serious senator. He was so good at what he did before, could he possibly be a serious senator.

Well, let me tell you, he's deadly serious. He has been one of the leading -- one of those scholars has written -- a fellow named Rosen, Professor Rosen, in The New Republic, that no senator has had as significant a first year -- in his first year in the Senate -- as significant an impact as Al has. And I echo that view.

And I remember for a guy who -- I had chaired the Judiciary Committee, or was the Ranking Member for over 16 years, and I remember when Sotomayor -- we sent Sotomayor up, and then we sent up a former staffer of mine, now Justice Kagan, in succession. And you'll notice what Al Franken did. Al Franken zeroed in on the one most consequential thing about the Supreme Court when he was asking question, and about how the Court can not only impact on social policy, which everyone knows and civil rights and civil liberties, but impact upon economic policy. He talked about the Commerce Clause. He talked about the economic impact of the Supreme Court, and how did they view this. It was -- my recollection -- maybe the only person who took that line of questioning.

And lest you think that may not have been relevant, just look at the debate that's going on now, and I will not comment on it until the decision is made, on one of the most significant, economic decisions that Court will make, as well as social justice issues, and that is on the Affordable Health Care Act, which will come out in June.

So, Al, you have been everything I expected you to be and more, and congratulations on a great performance. (Applause.)

And, Keith, it's good knowing you're there. Anybody who deserves combat pay, it's Keith in that Republican House of Representatives. (Laughter.) It does get better, Keith, and with your help and the help of a lot of us, we're going to make it a lot better. (Applause.)

And, we also want to thank Chris for being here. The Mayor has been great to me and gracious to me. He points every time I see him that I was his commencement speaker at law school, which I refuse to believe. (Laughter.) But I was, and it's great to be with you, Chris.

So I apologize for all those personal references, but you've got some great, great people here. And the one I wanted -- I'm not going to talk about Barack and me, and about our agenda, what I'm going to talk about is our number one agenda is to make sure that Amy Klobuchar goes back to the United States Senate. (Applause.)

Because -- you know Amy also took a seat on the Judiciary Committee the year I was -- I got elected Vice President, and my only regret is that she wasn't there when I was chairman of that committee; having Amy as an ally is like having four people with you.

You may know that I was the author of the Violence Against Women Act, and I joke that Amy was only about four years old when I wrote that legislation. And I do welcome -- and I welcomed then the exuberance of Shelia and Paul Wellstone in making sure that it not only passed, but got reauthorized and so on. But -- and it's the proudest moment of my career, the thing I'm most proud of is having drafted that legislation.

But you'd never know that by the passion with which Amy has taken up the cause that she was four years when it was originally written. It was -- reauthorizing this landmark piece of legislation, which is absolutely essential in the fight to protect the physical security and the dignity -- and the dignity -- of millions of women and children.

And as Vice President, the President has given me authority over that part of the budget that has to do with the law enforcement programs and Violence Against Women because I authored all that legislation, and we are now -- I'm going to be enlisting Amy after she gets this passed to focus now on a new threat that exists, and we're finding that the violence against and the victims of abuse of women between the age -- girls and women between the ages of 14 and 24 is as high as it's ever been, and there's a lot of work left for us to do, Amy, so I'm going to be knocking on your door.

But Amy has been a strong and a principled leader from the moment she came, and she's my friend. Back in 2009, when we were still fighting over the election results of Senator Franken's race, Amy was the sole senator from Minnesota for about six months, and it was an incredibly critical moment in the history of the U.S. economy, and for Minnesota. We had inherited the Great Recession, which cost Americans 3.5 million jobs the six months before we were sworn in; and before I lowered my right hand on that magnificent day with a million people watching on the Mall, being sworn in, we'd already lost 756,000 jobs that month, and it exceeded over 850,000 by the end of that month.

Minnesotans lost 54,800 jobs the six months before we were sworn in. Before we could get a single one of our policies passed, Americans lost another 4 million jobs in the private sector, and Minnesota lost another 81,600 jobs in the private sector. So almost 8 million people lost their place in the middle class -- because that's how I look at it.

The GDP had dropped 9 percent in the quarter before we took office, an astonishing decline -- the largest in over a half a century. Minnesotans and Americans lost $1.7 trillion in personal wealth, and the wealth I'm talking about is they watched the equity in their homes evaporate, which they planned on sending their kid to school off of, retiring on, and they watched their pensions and retirement accounts plummet. Remember then we were talking about whether the stock market would go below 6,000 -- below 6,000.

And on January 20, 2009, the day we were sworn in, and the next day we showed up in the office, we were handed a bill for $1 trillion for that fiscal year alone, before we had done a single, solitary thing. It was a moment of significant crisis. And we needed as many smart, principled, and mostly gutsy leaders in Congress -- as many as we could find. And we found Amy. It didn't take much to look for her.

But you know what I most love about her: She knows who she is, and she knows what she believes, and she knows why she believes what she believes in.

And those middle-class values that took her to Washington seem to be stamped in her DNA. I met her dad today, and I met -- I heard about her grandfather who worked in the iron ore mines, and her dad, a newspaper man, her mom, an elementary schoolteacher. No one has to explain to Amy what it means to be middle class and why it's so important the middle class be supported after almost 14 years of constant decline.

The economists that surround us all would define the middle class based upon a number. They will argue the median income is $50,420 in the middle-class. That's not how -- that's not how Amy and I define middle class. We define it a different way.

It's about having a job that guarantees you the dignity you're entitled to, being able to own, not just rent your home, to provide shelter for your family, and from which you can generate opportunity for your children because they live in a safe neighborhood, because they can attend a decent school that gives them the academic heft to be able to get into college, and knowing that if they qualify to get into college, you can get your child to college -- particularly today.

My dad used to say from the time I was a kid -- he never went to college -- he said, you know, you're going to be a college man, Joe. And I always wondered, why is that so important? He'd say, they can never take your degree away from you. I wondered what that -- how did that matter if I didn't have a job? And he said, Joey, it's about your dignity. It's about who you are. It's about your sense of yourself. It's about your aspirations.

The other team doesn't seem to quite understand that. It's not just about the degree. And today a college degree or something post-graduate is the only sure ticket to the middle class. It's virtually impossible to get there otherwise in the 21st century. And no one would be able to -- in the middle-class family I grew up in, the aspiration was not only be able to take care of your parents if they needed help in their old age, and that you hoped and prayed that when you reached that age, you didn't need the help of your children. You'd have some independence.

It's more a value system than it is a number, and it really is about -- it's about this country. And you take out the pieces -- I love these guys. They say that people -- maybe people should wait now. And maybe all the kids -- my wife is a full-time professor at a community college -- maybe all the kids should just go to trade school. Or you know send your kid to a private university, that's -- you should not aspire to do that. I went to a state university and I'm proud of it.

I don't know what these guys -- these guys don't seem to get it. My dad used to say, Joey, a job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It is about your dignity. It's about respect. It's about your place in the community. It's about your sense of yourself, who you are.

Amy knows it. She knows it and feels it in her bones. Tens of thousands of Minnesotans and millions of Americans have been stripped of that dignity, and that's what motivates this woman, as I've watched her. She may not characterize it that way. Presumptuous of me to characterize it. But it's all about dignity that every single, solitary American is entitled to be treated with dignity.

My sense is that motivates her passion about the Violence Against Women Act. It motivates her passion about good pay -- not just any job, a good paying job, a job that you can actually raise a family on, a job that you can be proud of. I think that's why Amy was able to take so many unpopular, difficult decisions that we knew, she knew and most informed people knew had to be taken in that six-month period when she was there alone. And she stepped up.

She voted for our plan to reauthorize the automobile industry which everybody now, except the other team, thinks was a good idea. But I remind you, even Democrats weren't for it then. But she knew like we did, we would not let an iconic industry of America just evaporate, an industry that helped build the middle class evaporate because of the assumption that we could not compete when she knew and I knew and the President knew we have the most competitive, productive workers in the world.

And if given a chance, they could lead the world again -- not just in automobile manufacturing, but in manufacturing. So she stepped up. She voted for it, an incredibly unpopular vote. She stepped when the economy was on the verge, literally, of a depression. My deceased wife, Neilia, used to have an expression -- I'd say, I have great faith in the American people. She said, Joey, I wonder how much faith you'd have had you lost. (Laughter.) And then she'd add -- she said, you know the great gift -- I mean this sincerely -- she said, the greatest gift God gave mankind was the ability to forget. And my mother would immediately add, that's true, Honey, because if it were not true, women would only have one child. (Laughter.) But it is a great gift that we don't dwell on -- maybe that's why I have trouble being a pessimist, not dwelling on the past.

But the truth of the matter is, a lot of people have forgotten just how serious the circumstance we faced was, and how much gumption it took to step up, like Amy did. We were literally on the verge of a Depression. We weren't talking about -- the first meeting we had in Chicago in that interregnum period, Fritz, we had the former -- Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Fed and all of these economists -- Democrat and Republican, 50 of them -- come with us after spending three weeks studying what we should do when we started. And the first thing we sat around this large, large rectangular table -- tables put together, and Paul Volcker said, Mr. President, the first issue we should discuss with you is whether or not -- we were deciding whether to discuss whether or not you would have to declare a bank holiday. We weren't talking about banks reorganizing. We were talking about them shuttering their doors. They were leveraged in some cases 30, 40 to one.

And so the votes Amy took, she stepped up and every serious economist knew that we needed to inject some energy into the economy, so she voted for the Recovery Act, which kept us from sliding into an even deeper recession and possible depression. She voted for -- and finally helped get passed, and by the way, no one now argues that that act did not save or create over 4 million jobs. You notice they don't use that anymore. It did. It did, but it was unpopular. It was unpopular.

Talking about stepping up, all the way back when Fritz and I served together, we fought for what ultimately became known as the Lily Ledbetter Act. It wasn't called that then, but a Supreme Court decision that said if a woman didn't know ahead of time that the man was being paid more than her, she should --basically was stopped from raising in the future. So we passed a piece of legislation -- she and Al passed a piece of legislation, which says that we -- says that we no longer will tolerate living in a country where our daughters are paid less than our sons for the same amount of work. (Applause.)

Amy saw, as the President and I saw, that there was no distinction between the capability and patriotism of gay Americans than straight American soldiers, and therefore, there should be absolutely no distinction in their ability to serve proudly and openly in the United States military. It was a civil rights issue, and it was also a national security issue. And she helped get it passed. (Applause.)

Neither Amy nor Al nor Barack nor I failed to understand that throughout history Wall Street has been the single greatest allocator of capital in the history of the world. And we all also knew it ran amuck. The cowboys were in control, playing with other people's money. So in order for us to save the system literally, to make capitalism work and not be manipulated, we brought back -- it back in line to its traditional role with rational regulation. Not popular among a lot of people who contribute to political campaigns -- Democrat and Republican.

She also joined me and the President pushing to make a consequential down payment on the blooming debt we inherited. And I remind you all, by the way, last Democratic President left the last Republican President with a surplus of over $260 billion a year, operating surplus, with a projected -- projected surplus over 10 years in excess of $6 trillion.

So we knew we had to move on two fronts, so she pushed hard as she referenced to bipartisan reform. She supported reducing the debt, in which we did reduce. We reduced spending by over $1 trillion, and we committed to the super committee, which had a failsafe in it that she supported with me, and I'm -- I take the blame for negotiating it -- that said the Congress either cuts another $1.2 trillion this year, or it automatically gets cut, carving out Medicare and other safety net programs.

I love these guys saying we did not do anything. What have they proposed? Nothing except raising the debt, and that sounds out of sync because you hear something different. You look at Paul Ryan's budget, if you add all tax cuts he wants to add on to the tax cuts we have now, he'd increase the deficit by close to $6 trillion over 10 years.

Amy and I come from similar backgrounds, we know at our core that my dad was right when he'd say that, I don't expect the government to solve my problem, people we were raised around didn't say solve my problem, but at least we expect the government, as my dad would say, to understand our problem.


The thing that I admire most about Amy is she has a gut understanding of the problems of ordinary, hard-working Minnesotans and Americans and has a sense of what they're facing. So let me conclude by saying one of the reasons I believe she's going to win, one of the reasons why I think the President and I are going to win, is that the guys we're up against have a fundamentally different philosophy.

They're not bad guys. They're good guys. They have a fundamentally different philosophy. We happen to think that workers matter in the success of businesses, and they should share in the benefits. We value the middle class because we actually believe the middle class determines the success of this economy and our financial instruments. Simply stated, we're about promoting the private sector, and I would argue, these guys -- particularly in the House -- are about protecting the privileged sector. There's a distinction. We're about a fair shot and a fair shake, and they're about no rules, no risk, and no accountability.

And the second reason I think we're going to win is the other team for the first time in my career is not hiding the ball. (Laughter.) They're not hiding the ball, man. They're saying exactly what they believe. Or as my mother would say, God bless them. God bless them. (Laughter and applause.)

Oh, God. (Laughter.) Twenty more Republican debates. Look, folks, they're giving the American people the clearest choice that I think we've had in presidential politics in the last five decades, a choice between a system that is in the minds of most Americans rigged, and one that is more of a level playing field.

And the third reason I think we're going to win is the American people -- and I know I get accused of being the White House optimist and Amy points out I'm an optimist -- I'm not an optimist because I'm sort of Pollyannaish about it. I'm an optimist because I know the history of the journey of this country. Never, never, never in our history when the American people have been given an even shot, when they believe everybody is on the deal, when they believe everybody is contributing, never, never have they let their country down.

As Emmylou Harris, the civil rights activist used to say, they're sick and tired of being sick and tired. They're sick and tired of being told what we can't do. They're tired of people telling them that America can't lead the world in the manufacturing of automobiles again. Where is it written that we can't? They're tired of being told that we can't lead the world again in manufacturing. Where is that written?

China, which everybody thinks has already eaten our lunch, produces 19.6 percent of value-added manufacturing. In the middle of a recession, we produce 19.2 percent. Where is it written that we cannot lead the world again in manufacturing?

Look, the American people, they know what we know, nothing could be further from the truth. Amy knows, as the President knows, as I do, as Al, as all of you in this room I hope know, we are better positioned than any nation in the world to be the leading economy in the world in the 21st century.

Guys, it's important to remember who we are. Our economy is three and a half times as large as the next largest economy. The most stable government in the world. Why in the middle of us being downgraded because of the refusal of the Republicans to cooperate in dealing with the national debt, why in the middle of it, after being downgraded three days later, did the world beat a path to our door to buy American treasury bills? Why? Because they know what so many people have forgotten: It is the most secure investment in the world.

Ladies and gentlemen, our individual GDP is 10 times as large as China. Ladies and gentlemen, mark my words, your children are going to hear the word insourcing as much as you've heard the word outsourcing. The world is changing, and it's ours to capture again. It's ours to lead again.

And I haven't even mentioned foreign policy or any of the other things that Amy and Al have worked on with us. When we came into office, we were among the least respected large nations in the world, now we're once again the most respected nation in the world.

So, folks, don't doubt the capacity of Minnesotans. Don't doubt the capacity of the American people. Just give them an even chance, and they will -- they will surprise you. And they've done it repeatedly.

Like I said, I think it's stamped in this woman's DNA. I think she gets it. So I have no doubt about two things. I have no doubt about America coming back, and I know -- have no doubt about Amy coming back.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for helping her. May God bless you all, and may God protect our troops. Thank you. (Applause.)


END 12:41 P.M. CDT