LOUISVILLE — Vice President Joe Biden rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt and told dozens of GE Appliances and Lighting employees Monday that the federal government’s stimulus package has been good for their company and country.

The Democratic vice president took a shot at critics of the $862 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which Republican U.S. Senate nominee Rand Paul has used as a favored example of excessive government spending.

Backed by Democrats in Congress, the stimulus package includes tax cuts, expansion of unemployment benefits and other social welfare provisions.

“I love these guys who say government should stay out when we’re in deep crisis, like some of the people you’re hearing from in this state and other places,” Biden said to cheers from GE employees.

GE is making a $600 million investment to expand manufacturing at the nearly 60-year-old Appliance Park in Louisville. It is being supported by $24.8 million in tax credits that were part of the Obama administration’s stimulus plan. The investment is expected to create about 830 jobs.

“Some say we cannot afford to make investments,” Biden said. “I say we cannot afford not to.”

Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Jack Conway did not attend Biden’s speech, but his campaign issued a statement later Monday in support of the stimulus plan.

“Jack is on record saying he would have supported the stimulus because our economy was in trouble and people were hurting,” said spokeswoman Allison Haley.

Conway’s campaign said he was making visits in Washington with former U.S. Sen. Wendell Ford, D-Owensboro. Conway’s wife, Elizabeth Conway, attended the speech.

Calls to Paul’s campaign for comment Monday were not returned. But the Republican National Committee, through spokesman Ryan Tronovitch, said Biden’s “sarcastic comments about the government’s involvement in the economic recovery are totally disconnected from reality and falsely imply that the Obama administration’s big-spending policies are doing anything but pushing massive debt onto the next generation.”

Tronovitch said Kentucky has lost thousands of jobs since the passage of the stimulus package and has one of the worst unemployment rates in the nation.

“Regardless of what Vice President Biden considers progress, the fact is, Kentucky’s economy is far worse-off than before the failed $862 billion stimulus,” he said.

For its part, the Democratic National Committee suggested that Republicans have been disingenuous about the stimulus package. More than 114 lawmakers who voted to kill the Recovery Act — more than half the GOP members in Congress — later took credit for stimulus-funded projects or called them a success, the DNC said.

A May poll conducted for the Herald-Leader found that 62 percent of likely Kentucky voters thought the stimulus program had hurt the economy or had no effect.

However, there was a sharp split among Republican and Democratic voters. Among Republicans, 8 percent said the stimulus spending had helped boost the economy or prevented it from getting worse. Among Democrats, 50 percent said the spending helped the economy or prevented it from sliding further into recession, the poll found.

Many voters have focused far more ire on corporate bailouts and the federal health care reform law this year than on the stimulus program, but it remains an example of excessive government spending, said James H. Weise, GOP chairman of the 2nd Congressional District in Western Kentucky.

“What I hear is that people don’t like the whole idea of putting us so far in debt,” he said, adding that he has not seen any benefit from the stimulus package.

In May 2009, Kentucky Youth Advocates, a non-profit child advocacy group, estimated the stimulus package would bring roughly $7 billion in direct aid and tax cuts to Kentuckians.

The organization said one of the biggest chunks of that spending was more than $900 million for Medicaid, a program from which Paul receives payments in his practice as an eye surgeon.

Barren County Judge-Executive Davie Greer said people might see the stimulus in a different light than bailouts because they can see stimulus money at work close to home, which could affect how the issue plays out in the Senate race.

“If they can see themselves what the money’s going to, it makes a big difference,” said Greer, a Republican. “People can see where it’s helping them.”

In Barren County, for instance, stimulus money helped finance construction of a new jail and is being used to build a new interchange on the Louie B. Nunn/Cumberland Parkway near Glasgow.

Biden made at least one mistake in his speech when he incorrectly called U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Louisville, “Jim.”

As he was winding up his 25-minute speech, Biden was interrupted when Jim Campbell, president and CEO of the GE plant in Louisville, fell off his stool and the 3-foot stage.

As several people gasped, Biden asked for a doctor. Paramedics and a doctor attended to Campbell, who walked away on his own in the plant, which was quite warm.

Biden left Louisville to attend a fund-raiser in southern Indiana for U.S. Rep. Barron Hill.
© 2010 Kentucky.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved. http://www.kentucky.com
By Jack Brammer and Bill Estep
jbrammer@herald-leader.com

He marshaled other tribal leaders in what grew into a nationwide anti-al-Qaida movement. Sattar acted knowing that the Americans had his back. “Instead of telling (the Iraqis) that we would leave soon and they must assume responsibility for their own security,” Col. Sean MacFarland, who worked with Sattar, has explained, “we told them that we would stay as long as necessary to defeat the terrorists.”

Sattar trusted President George W. Bush, and admired him “for sticking to his principles despite public opinion.” All of this is recounted in the new book on the Anbar revolt, “A Chance in Hell,” by Jim Michaels. As Mark Moyar writes in a review in The Wall Street Journal, it was only by winning the confidence of elites like Sattar – who was killed in September 2007 – that we had a chance to win over the Iraqi population.

What would Sattar have made of President Barack Obama, who has set a deadline of July 2011 for the beginning of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and of Vice President Joe Biden, who has guaranteed in a Newsweek interview – “Bet. On. It.” – that there will be large numbers of troops by leaving then? We know what Afghan President Hamid Karzai thinks – that he’d better explore an accommodation with his enemies well before any helicopters leave the U.S. Embassy rooftop.

Obama implicitly promised a departure from the bumptious ways of George W. Bush as commander in chief. Where Bush was stubborn, he’d be flexible; where Bush was unconditional, he’d be nuanced; where Bush went all in, he’d avoid overcommitting. But ambivalence doesn’t play well in a war zone, especially in a war of insurgency that’s partly a contest over staying power.

If Obama’s July 2011 deadline showcased his deliberative care as the honorary faculty chairman of national-security meetings, it played disastrously in Afghanistan. In sacking Rolling Stone subject Gen. Stanley McChrystal and replacing him with Gen. David Petraeus, Obama has a chance to hit “reset.” But only if he finds his inner cowboy.

There’s no way the Afghan equivalent of Sattar sitting somewhere on the outskirts of Kandahar can know Obama’s intentions when members of his council of war don’t know them. Biden says July 2011 marks the start of major withdrawals; Secretary of Defense Robert Gates disagrees. Who’s to say?

To put the severity of a hard July 2011 deadline in perspective, the last unit of the surge Obama ordered last December won’t arrive in Afghanistan until toward the end of the year. The deadline gives the fully surged forces all of six months to operate, in an environment Petraeus says is more difficult than Iraq.

Obama should redefine the deadline as the time frame for a review of the current strategy rather than its endpoint. If it’s not working, then he can reconsider.

Until then, he should shut down the rancorous internal debate within his administration and maintain the same firm tone he struck in his excellent Rose Garden remarks upon McChrystal’s departure.

His left might not like it, but they won’t berate him as a “chicken hawk,” as they did with Bush, or flail his chosen commanding general as “General Betray Us,” as MoveOn.org did during the Iraq surge.

Besides, his base isn’t his target audience. As President Bush always said, there were four key audiences during the Iraq War – the American public, the troops, our Iraq allies and the enemy. “The enemy thinks that we are weak,” he said in a candid White House interview during a low point of the surge. “They’re sophisticated people, and they listen to the debate.”

That’s just as true of the enemy in Afghanistan. Now that Obama has picked Bush’s general, he should replicate his stalwart style.

Britain’s emergency budget is the latest in a string of deep cuts in public spending and reflects new resolve in Europe, after Greece was pushed to the brink of bankruptcy and even threatened the bloc’s economic union, to tackle debt before worrying about growth.

As leaders of the Group of 20 economic powers prepare to assemble later this week in Canada, that single-minded focus is worrying the United States. Obama wrote a letter to world leaders Friday warning against excessive spending cuts.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel fought back this week, defending her government’s $80 billion savings plan as British treasury chief George Osborne forged ahead with his own grim budget.

Many European analysts agree that taming deficits is the more urgent priority.

Obama “has a point, but there are some countries that don’t have a luxury of a choice; they have got to get a grip and start cutting quickly because the alternative of becoming the next Greece is not palatable to them,” said Jonathan Loynes, chief European economist at Capital Economics in London.

The British budget aims to sharply reduce record public
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debt. Shoppers will pay higher sales taxes, wealthy people will be hit for higher capital gains taxes and banks will be charged a new levy on profits, a move already approved by France and Germany. Even Queen Elizabeth II accepted a freeze in her support from taxpayers.

In Germany, a spokesman for Merkel said she talked by phone Monday with Obama about a letter he wrote to G-20 leaders in which he cautioned against hurting the fragile global economic recovery by trimming spending prematurely.

The letter was seen as a criticism of Germany’s plan to reduce its deficit, but the spokesman said Obama did not pressure Germany to continue stimulus spending by piling up more debt. The spokesman spoke on condition of anonymity in keeping with government policy.

Europe’s leaders are stuck in a quandary: They must bring down mammoth debt through spending cuts to ward off economic panic, but the measures are bound to stunt growth. And it will probably take years to determine whether they chose the right medicine and dosage.

“My suspicion is that it will be a major drag on the economy for a few years, and it may be we decide in the future whether they went too aggressively, but the political and market climate right now is such that they had no choice,” Loynes said.

By David Stringer and Alan Clendenning

Associated Press
Posted: 06/22/2010 06:15:10 PM PDT
Updated: 06/22/2010 07:20:20 PM PDT