On Sunday in New Jersey, former Vice President Joe Biden blasted Democrats for ignoring working-class and middle-class voters.
But he slammed his own party while campaigning for a former Goldman Sachs executive who has been ridiculed for being more fond of “flying his Gulfstream instead of taking the mini-van.”
That candidate—Phil Murphy—is the Democrat seeking to become New Jersey’s next governor.
According to NBC News, Biden asked the crowd when was the last time they heard “about that guy making 50,000 bucks on an assembly line, [and] the woman — his wife — making $28,000 as a hostess?”
“They have $78,000, two kids, [are] living in a metropolitan area, and they can hardly make it,” he reportedly said. “When was the last time you heard us talk about those people?”
After then-President Barack Obama named Murphy to be his Ambassador to Germany in 2009, mainstream media news outlets reported that “Murphy evidently arrived in the style to which he is accustomed last month to take up his new post… touching down in an ostentatious top-of-the-line executive jet that left German Chancellor Angela Merkel grinding her teeth over President Obama’s gift of ambassadorships to wealthy donors.”
“Sources familiar with the incident” reportedly “said the arrival of Murphy, his wife and four soccer-uniformed kids on what some said was a Gulfstream V executive jet came just as the German press was describing how top embassy posts in the Obama administration were going almost exclusively to wealthy campaign donors.” Regular ambassadors reportedly would have arrived in economy class.
Murphy’s opponents on the left have also called him a “greedy” former Wall Street executive and even compared him to Democrat Jon Corzine, the Garden State’s disgraced former Senator and Governor.
The New Jersey Journal’s political editor Agustin Torres once mocked Murphy for trying to relate to middle-class familes.
“Like most middle-class soccer parents, the Murphys made sure their kids got to their games,” he wrote before quoting the Murphy’s exploits that were published in “one of those obnoxious family holiday newsletters that people send to friends and families, chronicling the sender’s inflated wondrous exploits over the past year”: “We traveled as a family a lot this year, including to Berlin (Germany), Italy, England, Lisbon, the Caribbean, Utah, Florida, and to Virginia and Massachusetts to see family and to watch lots of our children’s games …”
Biden, who may be eyeing a 2020 White House run, is doing his best to have it both ways when it comes to issues concerning middle-class voters. Biden has chided Democrats for not doing a better job of appealing to blue-collar voters. But the former Vice President has also implied at commencement addresses that working-class voters who voted for Trump are in the wrong to be nationalistic and are drawn to “hate speech” while blaming “the other” for their economic problems. On Saturday at Cornell, Biden said “there are a lot of folks out there who both are afraid and susceptible to this kind of negative appeal.”
“The immigrant, the minority, the transgender–anyone not like me became a scapegoat,” Biden continued. “Just build a wall. Keep Muslims from coming into the United States.”