Biden touts Obama’s record on manufacturing

DAVENPORT - Vice President Joe Biden declared Wednesday that “manufacturing is back” and launched an attack against Republican Mitt Romney at a Davenport high-tech manufacturing plant.

The vice president, addressing the crowd in a shirt and tie but no jacket, argued the president is investing programs to bring jobs back to the United States, while his potential rival's policies encourage outsourcing.

The Obama campaign reached into Romney's record as governor of Massachusetts as well as his proposals on the campaign trail to question the Republican's commitment to the manufacturing sector.

“It's a fundamentally different philosophy,” Biden said.

The Obama campaign, in a fact sheet distributed to reporters, accused Romney of contracting with offshore vendors while he was governor, vetoing legislation that barred overseas outsourcing by companies doing business with the state and overseeing a loss of manufacturing jobs in Massachusetts that was twice the national rate.

Romney was governor from 2003 to 2007.

Biden honed in on what he said was Massachusetts allowing call centers to be set up overseas to answer residents' questions about state business.

“Outsource that, denying folks in Massachusetts the jobs,” he said incredulously. “I'm not making this stuff up.”

The Obama campaign also said that Romney's plan to eliminate taxes on foreign profits would encourage shipping jobs overseas. Whether it was in the private sector or in political life, Romney had been “consistently wrong” on the economy, Biden said.

The vice president's stop in Davenport, one of two he was making in Iowa, is the first campaign trip in the state by President Barack Obama's re-election campaign. The ticket has made frequent official stops in Iowa, but this is the first campaign foray. Biden also traveled to Sioux City to meet with supporters.

The campaign sought to make the case Wednesday that the economy is rebounding, particularly in the manufacturing sector, a key part of the economies of politically important Rust Belt and Midwest states, including Iowa, Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

“Don't tell me that Americans can't make anything anymore,” Biden said. He said the administration had worked hard to boost trade, including taking aggressive action against China and seeking deals to open markets.

He noted that over the past two years, 15,000 manufacturing jobs have been created in Iowa. The state's unemployment rate was 5.4 percent in January, higher than it was before the recession but lower than the 6.1 percent it was at a year earlier.

Romney has sought during the campaign to appeal to middle-class voters, too, and his campaign responded to Biden today.

“Vice President Biden is part of an administration that has done more to devastate the middle class than any in modern history,” Amanda Henneberg, a Romney spokeswoman said. “Under President Obama's leadership, over 800,000 fewer Americans have a job, home prices have plummeted and gas prices have hit record highs. With that kind of record, it's no surprise that the Obama White House has taken to attacking a proven job creator like Mitt Romney.”

Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee pointed to companies on the president's jobs council that have created jobs overseas as a sign of the campaign's hypocrisy on the issue.

PCT Engineered Systems, the site of the speech, has been growing recently. The recession forced it to trim its work force, but since then it's grown to 70 workers. The company has credited some of the administration's tax policies for helping.

“We're hiring like crazy,” said Chris Colton, who does electrical design work at PCT and brought his 8-year-old daughter, Jordan, to work with him today to see the vice president.

Colton called himself an independent voter who considers the economy and education top priorities, particularly where technology is concerned. He said he was undecided about who he would vote for this fall.

After the speech, he called the remarks mostly rhetoric but said the claim about the Massachusetts overseas call center bothered him.

“I can see the point he's making, but I want to check the facts,” he said. He added that companies “ought to have loyalty to the countries you're in.”

Chuck Clark, a PCT worker who introduced Biden, said he is living proof that manufacturing is alive. Clark was laid off by Quad-City Die Casting a couple years ago but now is employed at PCT. Clark said Biden understands the blue-collar worker.

Political supporters in the audience said they hoped to see more of the presidential ticket, after months of listening to Republican attacks on the administration during the caucus season.

“This is exactly what the president and vice president need to do, to come back to places like this to get Democrats engaged,” said Rick Schloemer, a longtime Democratic activist in Scott County who attended the speech.

The Sioux City Journal contributed to this article.