Biden: ‘The politics of the past were not all that bad’

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MANCHESTER, N.H. – Former Vice President Joe Biden gave a full throttled defense of the “politics of the past” as he defended his record at Friday night’s Democratic presidential primary debate.

Rival Pete Buttigieg – who at 38 is the youngest candidate in the White House race – once again targeted Biden and some of the other candidates on the debate stage with years of political experience in the nation’s capital.

Buttigieg said at the debate that “I just bring a different perspective. Look, I freely admit that if you're looking for the person with the most years of Washington establishment experience under their belt, you've got your candidate, and of course it's not me.”

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Touting his 8-year tenure as South Bend, Indiana mayor, Buttigieg said “the perspective I'm bringing is that of somebody whose life has been shaped by the decisions that are made in those big, white buildings in Washington, D.C., somebody who has guided a community written off as dying just a decade ago through a historic transformation.”

“We need a perspective right now that will finally allow us to leave the politics of the past in the past, turn the page, and bring change to Washington before it's too late,” he stressed.

Biden – who’s four decades older than Buttigieg – shot back that “the politics of the past, I think, were not all that bad.”

He then touted that “I wrote the Violence Against Women Act. I managed the $900 billion Recovery Act, which, in fact, put millions and millions of dollars into his city before he came and helped save his city. I was able to do it -- I was able to pass the chemical weapons ban, arms control. And I was the first major leader holding public office to call for same-sex marriage.”

The former vice president – reprising criticism of Buttigieg he first brought up two days earlier on the campaign trail in the first-in-the-nation presidential primary state of New Hampshire – said, “I don't know what about the past of Barack Obama and Joe Biden was so bad. What happened? What is it that he wants to do away with? We were just beginning. It was just the beginning of what will be the future of moving this country beyond where it is now in significant ways.”

Buttigieg – responding to Biden – agreed that “those achievements were phenomenally important because they met the moment. But now we have to meet this moment, and this moment is different.”