CNN reports that Vice President Joe Biden, apparently unwilling to concede the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination to Hillary Clinton, told South Carolina Democrats that the latter years of the Bill Clinton administration were responsible for the beginning of the decline in middle-class financial security.
Attendees at the VIP Capital City Club in Columbia, S.C. asserted that Biden’s speech was largely “populist’ and intense. One listener called the speech an “Elizabeth Warren-type speech” because it targeted income inequality. Another said:
He said we have some of the most productive workers in the world, but corporations are more concerned about their stockholders than they are about their employees. He talked about how the fruits of labor go to stockholders, rather than to the people who are producing it. That the people making the money in this country are the corporations.
A third witness called the speech “a stem-winding, almost revival-type speech.” Some members of the Democratic Party view the Clintons’ economic policies as too sympathetic to wall Street. Biden has been down this road before; he has previously ripped Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) budget at George Washington University.