Joe Biden criticizes Sarah Palin's 'mildly dangerous' rhetoric.
The Democratic vice presidential candidate also characterizes John McCain as 'an angry man.' A day after the presidential debate in Nashville, both campaigns set their sights on battleground states.
WASHINGTON -- Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden criticized Republican counterpart Sarah Palin today for inciting "mildly dangerous" rhetoric into the campaign. Biden also faulted Republican presidential candidate John McCain for condoning her attacks.
"This is beyond disappointing, this is wrong," he said at a rally in Tampa, Fla.
Saying that McCain and Palin are "taking the low road to the highest office in the land," Biden argued that McCain's campaign has launched personal attacks against Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama as an attempt to get voters "to stop paying attention to what's really going on in this election." Calling McCain "an angry man, lurching from one position to another," Biden noted that McCain has agreed with President Bush on issues ranging from privatizing Social Security to what he called a "shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later foreign policy."
Borrowing a line from Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey, Biden added, "You can't call yourself a maverick when all you've ever been is a sidekick."
Palin has accused Obama of "palling around with terrorists," because of his loose affiliation with 1960s radical William Ayers, whose views Obama has denounced. The governor of Alaska, a huge hit among the Republican base, has attracted an audience in which voters respond with boos at nearly every mention of Obama's name. At one rally Monday, supporters reportedly shouted, "Terrorist!"
"The idea that a leading American politician who might be vice president of the United States would not just stop mid-sentence and turn and condemn that, you know, I just, this is a slippery slope," Biden said on NBC's "Today."
On CBS' "The Early Show," he called Palin's remarks about Obama's ties to Ayers "over the top" and noted that Obama was 8 years old when Ayers was engaged in domestic terrorism.
"You know the idea here that somehow these guys are once again injecting fear and loathing into this campaign is ... I think it's mildly dangerous," he said.
One day after their town hall debate in Nashville, McCain and Obama hit the campaign trail in the battleground states that could make the difference in the Nov. 4 election. Obama was at the Indiana State Fairgrounds in Indianapolis, his sixth visit to Indiana since clinching the nomination. Indiana, with 11 electoral college votes, has not voted for a Democrat for president since Lyndon Johnson's landslide win in 1964.
McCain and Palin planned a series of joint appearances in the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Ohio.
johanna.neuman@latimes.com
