At events in Florida, the president sought to paint Republicans as a threat to the two retirement programs. But his campaign swing did not go without bumps.
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“You’ve been paying into Social Security your whole life,” President Biden told an audience at O.B. Johnson Park in Hallandale Beach, Fla., on Tuesday, warning that Republicans “want to take it away.”
MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — President Biden pressed his argument on Tuesday that a Republican victory in next week’s midterm congressional elections would endanger Social Security and Medicare, bringing his case to the retirement haven of Florida, where the politics of the two programs resonate historically.
At a series of events that culminated with a rare full-fledged campaign rally, Mr. Biden took credit for legislation he pushed through Congress intended to curb the cost of prescription drugs for Medicare recipients and asserted that Republicans plan to undermine the foundations of the two major government programs benefiting older Americans.
“You’ve been paying into Social Security your whole life,” Mr. Biden told an audience at O.B. Johnson Park in Hallandale Beach before traveling to Miami Gardens for his evening event. “You earned it. Now these guys want to take it away. Who in the hell do they think they are? Excuse my language.”
“Well, imagine the widow here in Florida and all she has left is Social Security,” he added. “What’s she going to do if it goes away?”
The president has turned increasingly to stark warnings about Social Security and Medicare in the closing days of the campaign, banking on a traditional Democratic issue to galvanize older voters, who tend to turn out more reliably during midterm elections than other generations. Republicans complain that such “Mediscare” tactics distort their position and reflect desperation by Democrats on the defensive over inflation, which is near a 40-year high.
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The president’s trip to Florida opened a final week of campaigning before next Tuesday’s vote, but it did not go without its bumps. Mr. Biden, who at 79 is the oldest president in American history, fumbled at one point during his first talk of the day, confusing the American war in Iraq with the Russian war in Ukraine. While trying to correct himself, he then misstated how his son Beau, who served in the Delaware Army National Guard who served in Iraq, died in 2015.
“Inflation is a worldwide problem right now because of a war in Iraq and the impact on oil and what Russia is doing,” Mr. Biden said. “Excuse me, the war in Ukraine,” he said. To explain, he told the audience, “I think of Iraq because that’s where my son died.” Then he seemed to catch himself again and sought to amend his words one more time. “Because he died,” he said, apparently referring to his belief that Beau’s brain cancer stemmed from his service in Iraq and exposure to toxic burn pits.
In addition to Florida, Mr. Biden’s travels this week are expected to take him to New Mexico, California, Pennsylvania and Maryland. With anemic approval ratings, the president is avoiding some of the most competitive states, like Arizona, Georgia and Ohio, where Democrats are not eager to have him at their side. But he will join former President Barack Obama on Saturday in Pennsylvania, where Mr. Biden was born, to boost John Fetterman’s campaign for Senate, one of the hottest and tightest races in the country.
Florida would seem to be fertile territory for Mr. Biden, given that the Inflation Reduction Act, which he signed into law after it passed on party-line votes this summer, caps out-of-pocket prescription drug expenses for Medicare recipients, limits the cost of insulin, and empowers the government to negotiate lower prices with pharmaceutical companies, longtime goals of many older Americans. “This year we finally beat pharma,” Mr. Biden said on Tuesday.
But when national Democrats talk about states where they believe they have good prospects next week, Florida does not make the list. Even though statewide races have been close in recent cycles, Democrats have felt burned by narrow losses and have been reluctant to invest the sizable amounts of money required in a state with so many media markets only to be disappointed again.
Mr. Biden appeared on Tuesday with former Gov. Charlie Crist, who is seeking to reclaim his old office by ousting the incumbent Republican, Gov. Ron DeSantis, and with Representative Val B. Demings, the Democratic challenger to Senator Marco Rubio. Mr. DeSantis leads by roughly nine percentage points and Mr. Rubio by about seven percentage points, according to an aggregation of polls by the political data website FiveThirtyEight.
While the president has made speeches and headlined fund-raisers for Democratic candidates this fall, his rally on Tuesday night at Florida Memorial University, a historically Black college, was only his second on the campaign trail since Labor Day. Democrats chose a modest arena, assembling a far smaller crowd than typically mustered by another Florida resident, former President Donald J. Trump.
The president appeared most irritated by attacks on him over inflation. In Hallandale Beach, he pointed to his efforts to limit health care costs for seniors. “They talk about inflation all the time,” he said. “What in God’s name?” He added, “If you have to take a prescription and it cost you an arm and a leg and I reduce that, you don’t have to pay as much. That reduces your cost of living. It reduces inflation.”
To bolster his contention that Republicans are aiming to undercut Social Security and Medicare, Mr. Biden once again cited a legislative agenda put forth by Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the chairman of the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, that has been disavowed by other Republicans, most notably Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the party’s leader in the upper chamber. Mr. Scott’s legislative agenda called for “sunsetting” all federal legislation every five years, meaning programs like Social Security and Medicare would expire unless reauthorized by Congress.
Before the president’s trip to Florida, Mr. Scott said on Sunday that his position had been twisted and that “I don’t know one Republican” who favors cutting Social Security payments or cutting Medicare benefits.
“I believe we’ve got to preserve them and make sure that we keep them,” Mr. Scott told Dana Bash on “State of the Union” on CNN. “What I want to do is make sure we live within our means and make sure we preserve those programs. People paid into them. They believe in them. I believe in them. I’m going to fight like hell to make sure we preserve Medicare and Social Security.”
Source: nytimes.com
