President Joe Biden surprised viewers Friday when pausing his speech to acknowledge a woman in the crowd he said he knew when she was 12.
“You gotta say hi to me,” Biden said during a speech at the National Education Association headquarters in Washington, D.C. “We go back a long way. She was 12 — I was 30. But anyway, this woman helped me get an awful lot done.”
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Biden did not acknowledge how he knew the woman or what she did that helped him, but the remark caught viewers off guard.
The pause occurred during Biden’s rebuttal to House Republicans’ “Commitment to America” campaign platform that was rolled out Friday, in which Biden criticized House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who announced the platform at a speech in Pittsburgh.
“House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy went to Pennsylvania and unveiled what he calls a ‘Commitment to America,'” Biden said. “Now, that’s a thin series of policy goals with little or no detail that he says Republicans are going to pursue if they regain control of the Congress. In the course of nearly an hour, here’s a few of the things we didn’t hear: We didn’t hear him mention the right to choose, we didn’t hear him mention Medicare, [and] we didn’t hear him mention Social Security.”
The platform instead focused on four key areas: education, the economy, crime and border security, and government accountability.
“So let’s take a look at what Kevin said today,” Biden said. “He said Republicans want to ‘preserve our constitution freedom.’ That sounds great. I’m for doing that as well; we all are. But look at what they’ve actually done: MAGA Republicans just cheered and embrace the first Supreme Court decision in our entire history … that actually took away a fundamental right.”
The comment referred to the recent Supreme Court decision that overturned the landmark ruling in Roe v. Wade by sending the legality of abortion back to the states. Biden said that if the Democrats win in the midterm elections this November, Congress would codify Roe into law.
Biden also called out Republicans who claim to support law enforcement but did not condemn the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
“You can’t be pro-law enforcement and pro-insurrection,” Biden said. “You can’t claim to be a party of law and order and call the people who attacked the police on January 6 patriots.”
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McCarthy’s blueprint comes a day after the House of Representatives passed several major law enforcement pieces of legislation that Democrats hope to use to counteract allegations of being “soft on crime” ahead of the midterm elections.
