Biden comes to Williamsport
By Lily Beauvilliers
Senior Editor
President-elect Barack Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden’s plan for economic change will help students pay for college, Biden said Oct. 30 at Lycoming College.
His speech, part of the “Change We Need” rally in Lamade Gymnasium, attracted about 900 area retirees, family members and students.
“If you serve our country, not just in the military but in under-served communities, hospitals, senior centers and schools, we will get you to college,” Biden said.
Biden contrasted Obama’s economic plan with that of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), arguing that McCain’s policies would hurt working-class people by cutting taxes for big businesses.
The tax cuts “provide no relief for a hundred billion middle-class Americans,” Biden said.
Biden also criticized McCain’s health care plan. His policies “would tax your health care benefits as if they were income for the first time in history,” Biden said.
The audience booed.
Biden responded by saying, “these aren’t bad folks, but the economic philosophy is so, so bad.”
Biden also criticized the McCain campaign for overuse of the word maverick. He quoted Sen. Bob Casey (D-Penn.), saying, “You cannot call yourself a maverick when all you’ve been for the last eight years is a sidekick.” Audience members cheered and laughed.
After condemning McCain’s plans, Biden explained the changes he and Obama would like to make. Locally, this includes investing in the United States’ infrastructure, which would “create 82,000 jobs right here in Pennsylvania alone,” he said.
The speech was attended by people from the Williamsport area and beyond.
John Clough, a practicing lawyer from Juneau, Alaska, traveled 3,000 miles to the event.
“When [Gov.] Sarah Palin (R-Alaska) was named the vice presidential candidate, my wife and I got pretty upset,” he said.
So he took three months off to follow Obama and Biden on the campaign trail.
“Joe’s got a good sense of humor, but there were no personal attacks tonight,” he said.
Joshua Redmond, a senior at Pennsylvania College of Technology in Williamsport, came to the rally for a very different reason. As a green to gold active duty cadet involved in Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), he’s been to Iraq twice.
“We are not seeing the changes promised for the Iraqi people. The soldiers’ lives got better, but not a whole lot of good things are happening for the Iraqi people,” he said.
Before the speech, he said he hoped to ask Biden if “within 16 months, we will bring the Iraq war to a responsible close.”
Although Biden didn’t take questions, he did address the war.
“The first step in reclaiming respect is to end. This. War in Iraq,” he said, pounding the podium at each pause.
The timetable he named would have U.S. forces out of Iraqi cities by the middle of next year, and out of Iraq by the end of 2011.
Some Biden attendees planned to see Palin speak a few hours later. Jim Feaster, Tom McLoughlin, Chris Allebach, Joey Salvagno and Eric Tourscher, sophomores at Penn College, made special shirts for the occasion.
Each shirt featured the student’s name and possible future profession, in the style of Joe the Plumber.
On the back, they said “Obama ’08.”
“We want to show that middle-class workers also support Obama,” Salvagno said.
