Biden Says McCain Economic Bailout Proposal is Notable for What it's Lacking

ABC News' Matthew Jaffe Reports: As the two rival presidential candidates confer with President Bush and Congressional leaders in Washington about an economic bailout package, Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., said Thursday that he has seen Sen. John McCain's, R-Ariz., proposals for a possible plan and what caught the eye of the Democratic vice-presidential nominee was what was missing.

"What’s notable is what’s not in the package," Biden said at a rally on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, near his hometown of Scranton. "The silence on issues relating to the middle class is deafening in the package John’s put forward. There is no help for families struggling to stay in their homes. If John keeps changing his rhetoric, but not changing the worn-out philosophy that got us into this spot, if John continues to do that, ladies and gentlemen, why is John expecting us to believe he will be an agent of change? Look, that’s the reason we need change."

Biden blamed McCain for sharing President Bush's economic philosophies that the Delaware lawmaker cites as the cause of the nation's current financial crisis.

"Of all the important issues we face, all of them, all of them, John McCain has been profoundly out of touch because he’s been so in touch with President Bush’s position on those issues and nowhere, nowhere has that failed philosophy, that failed philosophy of the past eight years been more exposed than in the recent and immediate economic crisis we’re facing in this country," said Biden.

"John McCain has not disagreed with one single substantive economic reform policy initiative that George Bush has initiated in the last eight years, the very thing that’s dug us into the deepest hole we’ve been in in the last 40 years," the senator continued. "Ladies and gentlemen, where was John a week ago? Where was John a month ago? Where was John five years ago? Well, I’ll tell ya where he was, he was bragging to the very Wall Street titans he now calls the merchants of greed, he was literally on Wall Street bragging to them that he was shredding the regulations that were tying them down, and now, and now John, God love him, expects us to believe that he’s the man that’s gonna corral that greed he identified on Wall Street, he’s the man that’s gonna go out and reinstitute consumer protections and regulations so that we don’t see these cowboys run wild with your money and your future?".........