Joe Biden continues jabbing at Elizabeth Warren over Medicare for All

Former Vice President Joe Biden is challenging U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Democratic bona fides, stoking the flames of the front-runners’ ongoing feud over the future of health care in a new post Tuesday.

“I have fought for the Democratic party my whole career. I know what we stand for, who we stand with and what we believe,” Biden wrote in a Medium post published Tuesday evening.

“That’s not something everyone in this primary can say,” he continued — a thinly veiled nod to Warren’s past as a registered Republican in the 1990s.

Biden’s and Warren’s camps have been swiping at each other since Warren unveiled her plan to fund the government-run “Medicare for All” health care system last Friday. The spat marks a new phase of the 2020 presidential campaign that’s seen the Democratic front-runners attacking each other more forcefully with less than 100 days until the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary.

Biden’s deputy campaign manager branded Warren’s more than $20 trillion plan as “unrealistic” and cast as a lie her pledge that Medicare for All wouldn’t raise taxes on the middle class. Warren fired back by accusing Biden of “running the wrong presidential primary.”

Apparently, Biden found it amusing.

“The other day I was accused by one of my opponents of running in the wrong primary. Pretty amazing. On one level, it is kind of funny,” Biden topped his Tuesday missive.

There were other jabs sprinkled in — with Biden calling the attacks that have been leveled against him as “representative of an elitism that working and middle class people do not share.”

“I learned a long time ago that if you question someone’s motivations rather than their judgment you get nowhere. It’s hard to get past go if you start off by saying the other person is in the pocket of special interests or is corrupt,” he said.

In the end, Biden tried to have it both ways, calling for his Democratic rivals to “stop these kind of attacks” and “keep our eye on the ball” to “defeat Donald Trump” — all while saying he believed bolstering the Affordable Care Act of former President Barack Obama was the way forward.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2JQuEth