By Jeff Mason
SCRANTON, Pennsylvania (Reuters) -Barack Obama once said if there were no Scranton, Pennsylvania, there would be no Joe Biden.
The sitting president, whose term ends in January, returned to his childhood hometown on Saturday for a final campaign stop in support of Vice President Kamala Harris, seeking to use his sway in a critical part of an important swing state to help her beat his onetime rival, Republican Donald Trump, in Tuesday’s election.
Scranton has a storied history for Biden, and if he were still at the top of the Democratic ticket, a stop here would likely be seen as a full-circle moment for his final campaign.
Instead it was Biden’s swan song of sorts for his No. 2, and a muted one at that.
The president rallied union workers, a constituency with whom he is popular, at a small hall in the town where he grew up before his family moved to Delaware, where he would launch his more than 50-year political career.
“I’m so proud to be back,” Biden said, diving into familiar remarks about his and Harris’ support for unions, his pride in having been the first president to walk a picket line, and their efforts to restore pensions.
“Don’t forget where you came from,” he said to applause, warning of the ramifications if Trump is elected and does away with the Affordable Care Act healthcare program, which was Obama’s signature achievement.
Biden used colorful language when describing what he would like to do to those who would turn back his legislative accomplishments with a reference to his younger days in Scranton.
“I’m serious. These are the kind of guys you’d like to smack in the ass,” he said.
Biden told the crowd he would not have picked Harris as vice president if she didn’t share his views about hard-working Americans.
“We made a lot of progress, and Kamala will build on that progress,” he said. “We need to elect Kamala as president.”
Biden, who stepped aside as the Democratic Party’s standard bearer in July following a disastrous debate performance against Trump, has not been a regular feature on the campaign trail for Harris since she ascended to the top of the ticket.
They held a handful of early events, both official and campaign-related, as she energized demoralized Democrats in the summer. But Biden’s former campaign largely has left him in the shadows since, amid concerns about his age, penchant for gaffes, and low approval ratings with the American public.
The wisdom of that strategy was highlighted earlier this week when Biden’s call with a Latino group in which he referred to a Trump supporter or supporters as “garbage” partially overshadowed Harris’ well-received closing argument speech to tens of thousands of supporters in Washington. Biden later clarified his remarks, but the episode was an unwelcome one for Harris and her team in the final stretch of the race.
It was not enough, however, for them to ask Biden to eschew his stop in Pennsylvania, where he spoke at a union get-out-the-vote meeting with Carpenters Local 445, standing in front of a wall of signs that said “Harris for President” and “Thank you, Joe.”
(Reporting by Jeff Mason; editing by Diane Craft and Leslie Adler)
