Biden on economy: 'We are on the right track'
Vice President Joseph Biden was the featured guest at a private high-dollar dinner fundraiser at the Edina, Minn., home of Robert Pohlad, son of late Twins owner Carl Pohlad and the CEO of PepsiAmerica.
The intimate event likely raised about a quarter of a million dollars for the Democratic National Committee and Organizing for America, the Democrats' grassroots campaign arm.
The vice president arrived shortly before 5:30 p.m. and, after posing for photos, spoke to the group for a little more than 30 minutes.
Biden said he understands the criticism that the Obama administration has tried to do too much. But, he said, the issues of energy, education and health care were too urgent to lay aside.
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"We don't have a choice," Biden said. "We are not in this for incremental change. Incremental change will not work."
He told the donors that they are going to "take a lot of heat" but that the administration will succeed.
He said things had already gotten better in the economy, in part because of the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP.) He said he didn't like TARP -- "it stuck in our throats, quite frankly" - but it worked.
"Look, folks, we've got a long, long way to go," he said. "We are on the right track....I promise you, I promise you this is going to get better."
About 30 people attended, including former Vice President Walter (Fritz) Mondale; Alida Messinger, the sister of Sen. John Rockefeller, D-WV; and state Sen. Dick Cohen, DFL-St. Paul. The event had a $7,500-per-plate donation level.
He spent about half of his speech talking about the influence and friendship he had with Mondale and the late former Vice President Hubert Humphrey, also from Minnesota. Biden said both helped him stay in the Senate after his wife and daughter were killed and two other children were critically injured in a car accident in 1972.
"All I could do is think how to get the hell home...I did not want to stay," Biden said. Mondale, Humphrey and a few others made it possible for him to stay in the Senate, he said.
Mondale, he said, had confidence in him and that gave him confidence in himself.
Biden called Mondale the "single most prominent vice president in American history" and the father of the modern vice presidency.
Addressing Mondale, he said, "Your shoes are awful big to fill."
Biden said that after Obama asked him to be vice president at a meeting that happened to take place in Minneapolis, Biden first called his longtime chief of staff and then he called Mondale.
"I continue to call on Fritz for advice," he said.
"I'm glad you are still my friend and I'm glad you're still willing to talk to me," Biden said to applause from the small group.
Biden went on to talk about the meaning of the 2008 election. He said the election showed voters were rejecting a philosophy in the country that had held sway since 1980.
He asked the group to recall that Obama "got in trouble" for calling Reagan a "transformative president."
"He was...Prior to that, we had ridden on the New Deal. The New Deal had run out of steam; we were trying to figure out how to make it relevant," Biden said.
He said the election of 2008 was a similar rejection of the abiding philosophy, which "no longer had any relevancy."
Biden quoted a poem from William Butler Yeats: "All changed, changed utterly."
The pool reporter was asked to leave after the vice president's remarks around 6:15 p.m. Biden stayed for about another hour taking questions and having conversations with the donors.
The vice president said he could not stay for dessert because he had to fly out of Minnesota with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid so they could discuss the businesses of the Senate on the plane out. Reid had flown to Minnesota for that purpose.
