Biden Chides McCain For Taking 'Low Road' During USF Talk

Saying John McCain has been a "sidekick," not a maverick, Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden got aggressive toward the Republican ticket in a speech at the University of South Florida on Wednesday.

Rousing a crowd heavy with students in USF's Sun Dome, Biden hit McCain on tax policy, health care, economic deregulation and the dirty campaign he contended McCain has waged.

He said McCain has decided to "take the low road to the highest office in the land" - something McCain himself said he wouldn't do in his 2000 primary against George Bush - and that "100 percent of the advertisements that John McCain is now running are advertisements attacking Barack Obama."

Those attacks, he said, are "an attempt to get you to stop paying attention to what's going on in this country."

Biden was answering the attacks on Obama launched for the past several days by his counterpart, Republican running mate Sarah Palin, as the two play the traditional running-mate role of voicing the negative side of the ticket's message.

Palin used much of her speech in Clearwater on Monday to slam Obama, questioning his patriotism and his support of U.S. military personnel.

Biden's response Wednesday for the most part was more issue-oriented.

The closest he came to personal or character attacks was to refer to McCain as "an angry man lurching from one position to another," and to say he had hired the same political operatives to attack Obama who carried out George Bush's assault on McCain during the 2000 presidential primary.

That, he said, "is beyond disappointing, this is wrong."

Blaming deregulation of financial markets for the Wall Street financial meltdown, Biden praised McCain as "a good, decent and brave man," but said McCain's "consistent philosophy" is to "get government out of the way, cut regulations and let the market sort things out."

Biden gave his speech to a crowd that appeared to fill about half the 11,000-seat Sun Dome, many of them students.

Because of the death of his mother-in-law, Biden canceled stops in Lakeland and Melbourne on Tuesday that were to have been part of a two-day tour.

After his Tampa event, he had a similar appearance in Fort Myers - duplicating part of Palin's schedule Monday, which took her to Clearwater and Estero.

Biden spokesman David Wade said Biden will continue his aggressive stance toward the GOP ticket through Election Day, as Obama's "defender in chief."

Meanwhile, the Obama campaign gave yet another sign that it intends an all-out effort to win Florida, putting the state in the Democratic column in a presidential race for the first time since 1996.

Two of the campaign's top strategists - deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand and chief general election strategist Paul Tewes - have been dispatched to Florida, Hildebrand to Miami and Tewes to Obama's state headquarters in Ybor City.

The two are expected to continue doing their normal jobs, but to intensify the Obama campaign effort here.

Polls in Florida show a tight race - a Mason-Dixon poll for the Tribune this week gave Obama a two-point edge, but with a four-point error margin. That could be unnerving for McCain, who must have Florida's 27 electoral votes to have a chance to win. So even if Obama doesn't win the state, it forces McCain to spend time and money here rather than in other battleground states.

Obama has already advertised more heavily in Florida than in any other state and hired an unprecedented Florida staff of nearly 300.

Much of Biden's criticism of McCain focused on his health care plan, which aims to encourage Americans to buy their own health care insurance, offering a $5,000 tax credit to pay for it.

But the plan would also include making the value of employer-provided health care plans taxable. Democrats say that would cause employers to cease offering coverage, leaving consumers to "go it alone" in the insurance market.

McCain contends his proposal, including a "guaranteed access plan" for people who have trouble getting insurance, would lead to coverage for more currently uninsured individuals at a lower cost.

But his campaign has not denied that paying for the proposal would require sharp reductions in future budgets for Medicare and Medicaid.

Biden repeated the Obama campaign's theme of tying McCain to President George Bush.

"There is no difference - none - between what would be done by John McCain and what has already been done by GB," he said, adding a paraphrase of Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey: "You can't call yourself a maverick when all you've ever been is a sidekick."

Responding in an e-mail statement, McCain spokesman Ben Porritt said Obama and Biden "fundamentally lack ... a record of making change or reform" and have never challenged their own party in the Senate.

Porritt said McCain has "challenged the president and advocated for the surge in Iraq that is succeeding today," and has fought "broken regulations, out of control government spending, and global climate change."

2 OUT OF 3: OOPS!

Jim Piccillo had a three-step plan for introducing Sen. Joe Biden at Wednesday's rally at the USF Sun Dome: Don't fall down the stairs, get through the prepared speech and introduce Biden as the "next vice president of the United States."

He got two out of 3.

Piccillo flubbed and said "John McCain" instead of Joe Biden in the introduction.

"Instead of turning page two over, I set it aside," Piccillo said. "As I glanced over, my eye just caught 'John McCain.' It is a moment in my life when I was most honored and most embarrassed at the same time."

Josh Thomas