Giuliani and Santorum Assail Biden for Virginia Speech

By BRIAN KNOWLTON

WASHINGTON - Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. came in for an unapologetic drubbing on Sunday from two prominent Republicans for suggesting last week before a largely African-American audience that the policies of a President Romney would unshackle Wall Street but put some Americans “in chains.”

In turn, an Obama spokeswoman tried to turn the focus to language used by Mr. Romney himself.

But on Sunday, Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor, bluntly questioned Mr. Biden's stability.

“Oh, no, I don't think he's nuts,” he said on CBS's “Face the Nation.” “I'm just saying I wonder if he's got the kind of balance - probably what I should have said is the balance to be president of the United States.”

He added: “This guy is like one gaffe after another, and he's a - he's a joke on late-night television.”

Rick Santorum, a more recent presidential hopeful, was no less direct. The former Pennsylvania senator, who now supports Mitt Romney despite their sometimes bitter fight for the nomination, suggested that Mr. Biden was “playing the race card” by evoking a slavery-era image.

Such language, he said on CNN's “State of the Union,” was “horrendous” and Mr. Biden should apologize. But, Mr. Santorum added, the remarks reflected “exactly the tone of this campaign.”

The Boston Globe called in an editorial over the weekend for Mr. Biden to apologize.

Even Gov. Martin O'Malley of Maryland, chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, said Sunday that the vice president's remarks had been “indelicate,” but he forcefully rejected the notion that they had a racial undertone. “There's not a racist bone in Joe Biden's body,” he said on NBC's “Meet the Press.”

On Sunday, Mr. Obama's deputy campaign manager, Stephanie Cutter, also suggested that Mr. Biden might have chosen bet ter words but insisted that his point â€" that “we cannot go back to the days where taxpayers end up bailing out people because of their own reckless behavior” - remained valid.

Speaking on CNN, she then turned her fire on the Romney campaign.

“If we want to talk about words on the campaign trail that are poor choices of words, let's talk about Mitt Romney's, when he has been traveling for the last two years basically calling the president un-American, saying that he wanted to - the president wanted to make it a less Christian nation. Those are poor choices of words, and that is, you know, that we find completely offensive.

“So this faux outrage by Mitt Romney, complaining and whining about the tone of this race, is really completely hypocritical.”

Mr. Biden has been drawing criticism from Republicans ever since he began in a speech in Danville, Va., by saying: “Romney wants to let the â€" he said in the first hundred days, he's going to l et the big banks once again write their own rules, unchain Wall Street. They're going to put y'all back in chains.”

At the time Mr. Biden spoke it was not clear that people in the audience were offended; indeed, some laughed. But that did not help Mr. Biden escape the subsequent pounding.