NY-20: Murphy hosts Biden in NYC

This from the pool report, written by a reporter with the Staten Island Advance and distributed by the White House.
November 2, 2009
Tom Wrobleski
Staten Island Advance

Vice President Joseph Biden spoke at a fund-raiser lunch for Reps. Michael McMahon (NY-13) and Scott Murphy (NY-20) at the Harvard Club in Midtown Manhattan.
The event was held in the Biddle Room on the third floor. About 100 people were in attendance.

There was no big news.

Among the announced guests were Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, and Staten Island Democratic lawmakers state Sen. Diane Savino, Assemblyman Matthew Titone and Assemblywoman Janele Hyer-Spencer.

Biden entered the room with McMahon and Murphy. The vice president arrived later than scheduled after campaigning for Bill Owens, the Democratic candidate in the NY-23 race upstate.

Biden said he “gets to campaign a lot” and said of McMahon and Murphy: “These guys are about the pick of the litter.”

Biden, who began serving in the Senate when he was 29 years old, when Nixon was president, said that he had never seen a president inherit “so many critical problems” as Barack Obama had.

“That’s the reason why we’re here,” Biden said. “Because, you know, there’s not many opportunities you have to have people of the caliber of these two guys. These are serious players. Serious people.”

He said the two “could do any job in government.”

Biden said of his endorsement: “Hopefully it’s of some added value, but who knows?”

He also said: “The reason I like both of these guys is I think their quest to make sure we have decent-paying jobs, green jobs, good jobs, non-exportable jobs, starts in their gut, and works it way to their head and through their heart.”

He said the lunch was “not the first time Scott and I have hung out together at campaign events, in his district and here.”

He said the 2006 and 2008 House races were about people looking for change “and not incremental change.”

“This is an opportunity here to turn the corner,” Biden said.

Biden defended the actions the Obama administration had taken to stop the economic downturn, which Biden called “the most difficult since the Great Depression.”
He said upon taking office, Obama and others talked about whether to declare a bank holiday. “That’s literally what were talking about,” Biden said. “It’s easy to forget where we were.”

With tens of thousands of jobs lost and middle-class Americans losing their homes, savings and 401K accounts, Biden said, “In the faces of these crises, we knew we had to act.”

He said the least popular action was the bank bailout. Biden quipped that it would have been more popular to tell Americans “we were going to save rattlesnakes in Arizona.”

But if Obama had failed to act, he said, “There would have been a depression, not a recession.”

He said he knew what Republicans were against when it came to Obama’s fiscal policies, but “I haven’t figured out what in the heck they’re for.”

Biden said the stimulus is “beginning to work,” with jobs saved and “money coming back into the Treasury.” He said the country has been “pulled back from the economic brink,” and that Americans are now talking about “the shape of the recovery,” not further losses.

“The truth of the matter is, we’re movin’,” Biden said.

He said, “I’m absolutely confident we’re coming out of this recession. We’re going to come out of this stronger and better positioned than we ever have been.”

Biden said that $9 billion in stimulus spending in New York state had led to saved jobs, and improved roads and bridges. He said that administration tax breaks had given middle-class earners another $60 to $80 more in their paychecks every month, and that extended unemployment benefits had also aided Americans.

“Where would they have been without that money?” Biden said. He said that property taxes in New York and around the country would have “skyrocketed.”

“The truth of the matter is, the Recovery Act is working,” Biden said.

He said the administration is focused on helping the middle class through the hard times. “It’s all about giving them a shot,” Biden said.

Biden said difficult times are still ahead but that he expected the recovery to pick up steam in the first quarter of 2010. However, he said it would take “the better part of a year and beyond to recoup those lost jobs.”

He said the administration would continue to look to continue to improve things by tackling problems in energy policy, education and health care.

“We meant what we said by change,” Biden said. “We mean it. We mean it. It wasn’t merely a slogan.”

On energy, he said “the very people we’re sending hundreds of billions of dollars to are the very people who are funding the very terrorists who are trying to kill my son in Iraq, trying to kill people right now across the world, and actually took down the Towers here.”

To Republicans, he said: “What is the alternative? Give us one, other than ‘drill, baby, drill.’”

Speaking of the country as a whole, Biden quoted poet William Butler Yeats: “All’s changed. Changed utterly, and a terrible beauty has been born.” He said lawmakers now have to grasp that opportunity for change.

“These guys get it,” Biden said of McMahon and Murphy. “There are no longer any small-bore issues out there.”

He said, “We need people who think big, who understand this,” Biden said. “Who are willing to make the difficult kind of votes they have to make.”

Murphy, who has U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s old seat, said it was “a great honor for Mike McMahon and I to host the vice president today.”

Murphy said he “planned to lean heavily” on McMahon for transportation and infrastructure help for his district. McMahon is on the House Transportation Committee.

McMahon introduced Biden and said it was a “thrill” to be there with him. He said Murphy had “brought a great resume to Washington as an investment banker.”

Murphy is on the Agriculture Committee. McMahon joked, “We don’t have much agriculture on Staten Island, but I wish we did.”

To Biden, he said, “You’re out there fighting for us.” He called Biden “a son of Delaware and an Amtrak rider,” and “a great son of this country.”

McMahon said that he and Murphy are among the Frontline Democrats, who get extra fund-raising and campaign help from the national party.

“We gotta work very hard to hold onto our seats,” McMahon said.

McMahon said that “our government has done nothing more important than pass the stimulus,” which he said had translated into “jobs and jobs and jobs” for New York state.