Vice President Joe Biden appeared this morning on ABC with Jake Tapper to discuss what the administration calls the ‘summer of recovery’ and the effects of the massive stimulus bill passed last year by Congress.
Biden told Tapper that getting the bill passed required compromising on the size of the stimulus to gain Republican votes.
“In order to get what we got passed, we had to find Republican votes,” the vice president said. “And we found three. And we finally got it passed.”
Were it not for the need to appease conservatives, Biden added, “I think it would have been bigger. I think it would have been bigger.”
Conservative blogger Ed Morrissey points out that the original stimulus proposal from the Obama administration did not expect that Congress would authorize a stimulus package much larger than the one it did (READ THE PROPOSAL).
“Estimating the aggregate employment effects of the proposed American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan involves several steps,” the proposal reads. “The first is to specify a prototypical package. We have assumed a package just slightly over the $775 billion currently under discussion.”
Later, the report recommends that the stimulus bill be “large” but does not specify just how large it would need to be to lead to job growth.
The final stimulus bill passed by Congress totaled about $787 billion — a number President Obama seemed happy with at the time.
“The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that I will sign today, a plan that meets the principles I laid out in January, is the most sweeping economic recovery package in our history,” the president said a speech in Denver.
“Well, I gave you a range [for how much stimulus we need]. I think we’re in range,” he said later.
Other senior Democrats agreed.
“It’s stimulative and timely,” said Sen. Ben Nelson, Nebraska Democrat, of the bill.
Roughly $100 billion in spending beneficial to House Democrats was cut from the bill as a result of compromise with moderates in the Senate. The president applauded the bipartisan deal at the time.
“Last night, the Senate struck a compromise on the economic recovery plan and put us on our way to giving the economy the short-term jolt and long-term investments it needs,” he said in his weekly radio address.
Still, echoing Biden’s comments today, the president said shortly after the bill’s passage that he thought it wasn’t quite perfect.
“No president expects to get 100 percent of what they want, and I’m no different,” he said in Ohio.
In the wide-ranging interview, Biden also expressed to Tapper a muted defense of the tea party movement. Earlier this week, the NAACP called on tea party leaders to condemn ‘racist’ elements within their ranks in a much-publicized resolution.
“I wouldn’t characterize the Tea Party as racist,” he said on ‘This Week,’ adding that “there are individuals who are either members of or on the periphery of some of their things, their — their protests — that have expressed really unfortunate comments.”
WATCH: THE BIDEN/TAPPER INTERVIEW
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