(
)
WASHINGTON — Vice President Joe Biden took campaign hyperbole to a new level yesterday, telling a crowd in Virginia that Mitt Romney wants to undo Wall Street reforms — and “put y’all back in chains.”
“He said in the first 100 days, he’s going to let the big banks once again write their own rules,” Biden told a racially mixed crowd in Danville, not far from the North Carolina border.
“Unchain Wall Street,” he said. “They’re gonna put y’all back in chains.”
The line solicited some boos, but it was unclear if the audience was reacting to the Romney policy or to the loaded metaphor.
Romney fired back last night at a campaign event in Chillicothe, Ohio, saying, “This is what an angry and desperate presidency looks like.
“Mr. President, take your campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago.
“His campaign and his surrogates have made wild and reckless accusations that disgrace the office of the presidency.
“President Obama knows better, promised better, and America deserves better.
“His campaign strategy is to smash America apart and then try to cobble together 51 percent of the pieces.
“If an American president wins that way, we all lose,” Romney told the thousands at a rally.
Biden later sought to clarify his remark by saying he meant to use the word “unshackle” instead of “unchain.”
“The last time these guys unshackled the economy, to use their term, they put the middle class in shackles. That’s how we got where we are,” Biden said at the later event.
Obama’s deputy campaign manager, Stephanie Cutter, defended Biden, and instead slammed Republicans’ “hypocritical” outrage, “particularly in light of their own candidate’s stump speech questioning the president’s patriotism.”
“For months . . . Republicans have called for the ‘unshackling’ of the private sector from regulations that protect Americans from risky financial deals and other reckless behavior that crashed our economy,” she said.
“Since then, the vice president has often used a similar metaphor to describe the need to ‘unshackle’ the middle class.”
Biden’s remarks — a critical battleground for President Obama’s re-election — weren’t his only inartful comments.
He also flubbed his location when he said, “With your help, we can win North Carolina again!”Biden had stumped in the Tar Heel state Monday.
Obama has been steadfast in backing Biden, who despite his gaffes appears comfortable glad-handing voters, as he did at a country store yesterday in Floyd, Va.
The campaign has even memorialized one of Biden’s biggest gaffes — telling Obama on a live mike that winning the health-care fight was a “big f–king deal” — on a campaign T-shirt.