Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign took aim at primary election opponent former Vice President Joe Biden Monday after Biden claimed Sanders hasn’t been “consistent” in his efforts to protect and raise Social Security benefits.
A reporter with local New Hampshire news station WMUR challenged Biden on air about his claim that the Sanders campaign had misinformed the public about the former vice president’s attacks on Social Security with a “doctored” video last week.
Biden told the reporter he had advocated for cuts “20 years ago” and said Sanders “hasn’t been consistent on Social Security,” without elaborating on the Vermont senator’s alleged inconsistencies, before explaining his current plan for the benefits which millions of retired Americans rely on for at least 90% of their income.
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“The facts are indisputable: Biden repeatedly pushed to freeze Social Security funding, cut Social Security benefits and raise the Social Security eligibility age—and he bragged about it on the floor of the U.S. Senate,” countered Faiz Shakir, Sanders’s campaign manager, in a press statement.
The WMUR reporter suggested that Biden’s claims of consistency on Social Security don’t hold up, considering he acknowledged advocating in the 1990s for a freeze on cost-of-living adjustments for the program, and now claims he wouldn’t support such a freeze.
Biden tried to use the interview as an attempt to “distort his own decades-long effort to cut Social Security,” the Sanders campaign said.
Last week, Bloomberg News published an article saying Sanders also pushed for Social Security “adjustments” as Biden and the Republican Party did, suggesting he meant benefits should be cut.
“He may be borrowing a word but he’s speaking a totally different language,” Sanders’s communications director, Mike Casca, told Bloomberg.
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