Despite his hardscrabble upbringing, Joe Biden is often justly criticized for putting credit card companies’ interests in front of the interests of consumers. Biden is praised for spearheading the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 (VAWA), but he is just as often pilloried for his work on the United States Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control, where he has perpetuated several layers of insanity in the failed and inhumane War on Drugs. Biden is almost solely responsible for the fact that Robert Bork is not currently a member of the Supreme Court, but he gets less praise for that than he gets criticism for allowing Clarence Thomas to get through his committee.
Biden’s record is complex and it isn’t easy to define him ideologically. But, by background and temperament, he seems a good fit for the job of defending the middle class. That is what Obama has tasked him to do, and that is what Biden writes about in today’s USA Today. Specifically…
Right now, our most urgent task is to stabilize our nation’s economy and put it back on track. That is what our economic recovery package moving through the Congress is all about. We need to make these critical investments to jump-start our economy.
On top of this urgent task, though, we have an important long-term task as well. Once this economy starts growing again, we need to make sure the benefits of that growth reach the people responsible for it. We can’t stand by and watch as that narrow sliver of the top of the income scale wins a bigger piece of the pie — while everyone else gets a smaller and smaller slice.
One of the things that makes this task force distinctive is it brings together — in one place — those agencies that have the most impact on the well-being of the middle class in our country. We’ll be looking at everything from access to college and training with the Department of Education, to business development with the Department of Commerce, to child care reform with Health and Human Services, to labor law with the Department of Labor. With this task force, we’ll have a single, high-visibility group with one goal: to raise the living standards of middle-class families.
Over the upcoming months, we will focus on answering those concerns that matter most to families. What can we do to make retirement more secure? How can we make child and elder care more affordable? How do we improve workplace safety? How are we going to get the cost of college within reach? What can we do to help weary parents juggle work and family? And, above all else, what are the jobs of the future? Here, we’ll be looking at green jobs, better-paying jobs, better-quality jobs.
This seems like something Joe Biden can do and do well. And it will keep him busy so that maybe he won’t have time to come up with any more harebrained schemes to carve up Iraq into pieces.
