you have a sitting vice president talking to working class people in youngstown, ohio, and yet when he says it, i think of what tom wicker wrote about richard nixon, one of us. you know? biden is from america s working class, america s middle class. some politicians can actually deliver that message, and biden seems to ring true with that. i teach a course in political media out at the university of california santa barbara. one of the things i stress is the continuity of this message, of i m one of you. it goes back to andrew jackson, william henry harrison with the log cabin campaign, abe lincoln, the railsplitter. if you don t come from the middle class, how do you connect with the working class? some folks do it.
think about this? i would say the populist stuff doesn t work, but it works with biden because biden, he feels it. working class guy. he feels it. by the way, you look at all of these millionaires that run our country and then you look at his taxes every year, he s you know, he hasn t cashed in. he feels it. he understands it. he lives it. he s vice president of the united states. he has secret service protection, and he s still joe biden from scranton, pennsylvania. we hear ripples there s animosity or anger towards the vice president on i don t believe so that. i can t believe it. on the gay stuff. not for a second. for forcing the president s hand. but he s a valuable asset. he s the best thing they have when it comes to politics. i m sorry. he knows what he s doing. he went after them.
guy protecting millionaires. you give reagan beer in south boston, he raises it and looks like he s been there before. he looks like he belongs, like bill clinton can do it and joe biden can do it in a way ironically that the guy at the top of the democratic ticket, barack obama or mitt romney may not be able to do it as well. biden seems to have found his voice yesterday on the campaign trail. capturing the mood of the country is something that leaders have to do, and actually as a fellowairly unique part of presidency. he can run it better than the other guys, but presidents have to do more than that. it s not just making the numbers work or getting legislation through, where this president has stumbled in terms of his public image. too much of the legislator in chief. presidents have to capture the mood, speak for the people,
so if he says that about barack obama, you re right, you re right. when joe biden says it shouldn t be the case, because you look at barack obama and his grandparents raised him in hawaii. very middle class upbringing. for some reason biden when biden says, my parents believed i could be president of the united states or i could be a millionaire, you know he s telling the truth. so that brush-back about being anti-capitalism doesn t work against biden as well. no. the vice president of the united states, joe biden, has a picture in his head. he can see the house on up top of the hill where the rich people live in the town that he grew up in, and he knows instinctively that the people who live at the bottom of the hill, the bidens, the scarboroughs when we were younger know that they didn t resent the rich people at the top of the hill, but there s a
resentment called trust. the people at the bottom of the hill believe that they can get up there to the top of the hill, bullet on but once that line of trust is broken like with the banks, the rigged tax codes, the breaks that the rich get, once that line of trust is broken then you have a problem. that s where joe biden can which is why biden s message works is because there s not that resentment. i tell the story after my dad dies when we were in meridian, mississippi, we d drive past country club drive and look at the big houses and golf course. i still wouldn t be allowed to meridian s country club. my parents would say look at those big houses. you keep working hard and do well in jurschool, you can live one of those houses. i promise you being a doctor or a lawyer in 1971, 72 when any