On Tuesday Vice President Joe Biden told a crowd in Danville, Va., that if Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is elected to the White House this fall, his administration would “put y’all back in chains.”
Biden is known to make gaffes, but the Obama campaign gave no indication this was a misstep from Biden and doubled-down on the sentiment. In an appearance on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” campaign spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said it was a metaphor that President Barack Obama “probably” agreed with.
“I think he probably agrees with Joe Biden’s sentiments,” Cutter said. “I mean he’s using a metaphor about what’s going to happen … look, I appreciate the faux outrage from the Romney campaign. If you want to talk about the use of words, then take a look at Mitt Romney’s stump speech where he basically calls the president un-American. So does [Romney spokeswoman] Andrea Saul agree with that language?”
Although the Romney campaign denounced the remarks, Cutter said Biden’s commentary had to be viewed in its entire context to be fully understood.
“If you look at the entire context of what the vice president was talking about, he was making a point that if we repeal Wall Street reform, which is what Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan want to do, we go back to the days where they write their own rules,” Cutter said. “And we saw what happened. Taxpayers had to bail them out. We had to spend billions of dollars of taxpayer dollars bailing them out. Now, I would think that that, you know, that is a problem for middle-class taxpayers. That would hamper their ability to take care of their own finances.”
Cutter added that if Biden’s words were not heeded, then the consequences could be another financial system collapse.
“Bottom line is that we have no problem with those comments — those comments in the full context of them,” she said. “And we can play a game with the Romney campaign of pulling these things out of context. We saw how that ended up for them over the past couple weeks. But what the vice president was talking about, if you look at those remarks is that there is a consequence to repealing Wall Street reform. We’re going back to the days where they write their own rules. We saw how that worked out. They crashed our financial system and taxpayers had to pick up the pieces. And we don’t want to go back there.”