Former Vice President Joe Biden is tired of Democratic rivals dredging up events from his four-decade political career as he vies for the Oval Office in 2020.
“What I want to make clear is this going back 10, 20, 30 years is just ... a game to make sure that we hand Republicans an election coming up,” Biden told reporters Thursday afternoon in Detroit.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) had attacked him on the debate stage Wednesday night for one such dated opinion, recalling Biden’s argument against expanding a child care tax credit in 1981 when he was a senator from Delaware.
Biden said he opposed the proposed expansion because it would help too many families he deemed to be well-off. He supported a child care tax credit for parents making a combined income of less than $30,000, or around $88,000 in today’s dollars, but the proposal had no such cap.
In a July 29, 1981, report, the Indianapolis News quoted Biden saying the legislation provided “a sad commentary on this society.” Although he noted that it did not matter to him which parent took up child care responsibilities, his remarks seemed to cast judgment on households with two successful working parents.
“[W]hat we are doing now as a social policy, is saying, ‘Here, drop them off at 8 o’clock in the morning and pick them up at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, because I want a new patio; because I want to go on vacation; because I want to expand my horizon.’ As a social policy I think it is undesirable and wrong,” Biden said at the time.
In an op-ed the same year, he used much of the same language: “[A] recent act of Congress puts the federal government in the position, through the tax codes, of subsidizing the deterioration of the family. That is tragic.”
He was the only senator to vote against the expansion of the credit.
Gillibrand seized on Biden’s past hand-wringing at the debate.
“Under Vice President Biden’s analysis,” she asked Wednesday night, “am I serving in Congress, resulting in the deterioration of the family?”
Biden responded that both his deceased and current wife worked outside of the home and that he now supports an $8,000 child care tax credit for anyone who needs it.
On Thursday, Biden again distanced himself from his old views.
“Look, folks, there’s a lot of things people have done in their past and votes that don’t have a context today ― that are taken out of context,” he told reporters. “I want to make the point that some of these assertions being made were absolutely ― how can I say it nicely? Not true and taken out of context.”
He has not, however, addressed much of the family-values substance of his 1981 argument and how or why his stance has changed.