Hard Questions for Joe Biden

A face-to-face with the VP candidate.

by Tom Namako

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City Paper landed a harried interview with Joe Biden at Linvilla Orchards in Media on Tuesday night, outside a white tent surrounded by state police, secret service and yuppies armed with Blackberries. We were given 6 minutes, and took it to 6 minutes and 34 seconds (take that, media handlers!).

Biden was in full Biden mode; that is, he was speaking with his usual straightforward, unpredictable eloquence. He had just walked away from addressing thousands of people on a grassy knoll for 40 minutes, with a cart of pumpkins, a crop field and two American flags in the background. At times, his stump speech loudly slashed into John McCain; and at others, he lulled the crowd with anecdotes about pumping gas with his friend "Charlie."

We could have asked a bunch of questions about Sarah Palin, and how she's a moose-hunting wrecking crew aimed at the Democrats' heads. Instead, we asked about Philly.

City Paper: You were in Northeast Philadelphia about a week and a half ago and you experienced a problem that's been going on in Pennsylvania and Philadelphia politics for a long time. That's people who have deep-seated notions of who they are going to vote for based on the way the look or what their name is. How do you plan on getting those people on your side?

Joe Biden: Just by letting them know who Barack is. And the more people who know who he is and know what his roots are and know that he's a ... you know, this is the guy who, if he grew up in Northeast Philadelphia, he'd be hanging out with the very people who were wondering about him. This is the real deal. This guy's got a backbone-like spine, he can take you to the basket in a schoolyard game, he'd be the guy who'd be there with you and covering your back. And right now, the Republicans are misrepresenting who he is with a scurrilous campaign on the Internet about this guy being some kind of exotic guy from a different part of the world. This guy, his parents grew up in Kansas, he grew up in a generally all-white neighborhood in Hawaii. I mean, come on, this guy's the real deal.

CP: Speaking of the Republicans' attacks, McCain and Palin are saying all sorts of things that are essentially untrue. I'd be interested to know when the top of the ticket, such as yourself and Obama, will outright call them on what it appears they're doing, which is lying. Is that word going to be used?

JB: Yeah, I used it tonight. They just flat-out lied about him. They flat-out lied about him in a number of areas. For example, the scurrilous ad they have going about how Barack Obama wanted to teach kids about how to have sex, or whatever the hell they say, in kindergarten. It was about teaching kids how to avoid predators, how to identify and avoid predators, child predators. Total misrepresentation, every major news media, even Fox News acknowledged it's not true. Look, the thing that disappoints me most about John McCain is what I said tonight — literally, when they were going after him in 2000, I offered to stand up for him. Literally. A Democrat in a presidential race offered to fly to California and stand next to him and say what Bush is doing to you is just immoral and wrong. The same guy, Charlie Black, who's the guy who headed that operation, is now working for John McCain. It's just wrong.

CP: On urban issues, Philadelphia is broke. Our mayor just announced that he'd have to cut in departments right after he got the budget passed. What can, and what would, an Obama-Biden White House do for cities?

JB: Invest in cities. ... Right now, the reason that cities are in such trouble is because budgets have been cut drastically. Their economic base their tax base, is whittling away because industry has fallen off, jobs are being exported and people are moving to the suburbs. So what you've got to do is, you've got to give people incentives to get back in the city. You've got to gave people the ability to go out and provide, for example, projects to rebuild the sewer system, projects to rebuild the housing, projects to rebuild — this is the way you can do two things. You can generally better a neighborhood, you can provide infrastructure so businesses will want to stay in the city, and you pay people $50,000 bucks a year, on average, from the worker to the laborer to an engineer to put in a new sewer system, a new water system, the highways, the roads. This administration does not want to invest at all, does not want to invest at all in American cities. They act like they're some foreign country or something.

Aide: They might be better off if they were in this administration.

CP: So American cities can expect money from...

JB: Absolutely, positively, they can expect focus, focus in this administration. You know that old expression, if you don't visit a bad neighborhood, it'll visit you? You know, people deserve better, they deserve a lot better. And people are going to say, "How are you going to pay for this?" Look, right now the tax cut going to the people who make over $250,000 is $130 billion a year. What do you think I can do for cities with one-tenth of that amount of money?

CP: I was reading Obama's Blueprint for Change, and was looking at some things he had in relation to violence in inner cities. And notably, when it comes to violence in inner cities, there's only one passing reference (Editor's note: there are several passing references). You've got a good history of pushing crime bills and passing them; is that going to be a priority for him? We know you'll push it, but will he listen?

JB: Absolutely. There's two commitments I asked for from Barack: I wanted to make sure we were on the same page, and it's because he's voted with me on every crime bill, he's voted with me on everything related with Israel and the Middle East. I wanted to make sure he was right on both of those things, if I were his vice president. Look, I didn't spend 35 years of my life working on those two issues, among others, to sign on to somebody who I didn't believe would do the same thing. I'm the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, it ain't a bad job. And guess what? Presidents have to go through you, but they don't have to go through vice presidents, you know? But I'm absolutely convinced he's as committed as I am. And by the way, we've got to change the sentencing. The way in which there are disparities in the sentencing system. You pick up some kid on Aramingo Avenue for doing a dime's worth of, you know, cocaine, they don't call it cocaine, they call it crack. But you've got a kid in the suburbs and a kid can have five lines on his dining room table, the kid doesn't get any time out in the suburbs. The kid who takes the nickel bag of crack is gone. I mean, it's wrong. The sentencing disparities are just way out of whack.

CP: Let me ask you a personal question. You're an excellent speaker, though in the past there have been a couple controversies, mostly misinterpretations, about things you say. Are you worried that something might come out, something you might say on the campaign trail, that will just tank this whole thing?

JB: Personally, I'm not the guy making the mistakes in this race. So far, so good, you know? Look, I think I have a reputation of saying what I believe and I'm straightforward about it. Sometimes I'm going to say things that are going to offend people. But you know, if I start trying to curb every word I say every way I say it, then you know, not only do I lose my authenticity, you know, I lose my voice. And I think that I've been able to demonstrate that, so far, knock on wood, you know, that I haven't said anything that people have really been able to take out of context. I'm leaving that to John McCain and others in this race.

(tom.namako@citypaper.net)