President Biden “bowed to progressives” on Tuesday when he broke with precedent to become the first commander-in-chief to visit a picket line, former President Barack Obama’s car czar said Wednesday, calling the trip “outrageous.”
“For him to join the picket line is outrageous,” Steven Rattner, Obama’s former top adviser on the auto industry, said Wednesday in an interview with NBC News.
“There’s no precedent for it,” Rattner explained. “The president’s tradition is to remain neutral on this matter.”
Rattner headed Obama’s auto industry task force in 2009 when billions of taxpayer dollars were used to bail out General Motors and Chrysler.
The former auto czar said that while he understood the politics behind Biden’s show of solidarity with striking auto workers, the trip was still “wrong.”
“I understand politics. The progressives all said, ‘We don’t want a mediator; we want an advocate,’” Rattner said. “And he bowed to the progressives, and now he’s going there to put his thumb on the scale. And it’s wrong.”
Steven Rattner said Biden “bowed to progressives” by joining striking auto workers on the picket line Tuesday. Bloomberg
Biden played up his blue-collar image Tuesday as he stood on a picket line outside General Motors’ Willow Run division center with UAW President Shawn Fain.
Biden pumped his fist as the union boss railed against “corporate greed” and likened his union’s strike against the “Big Three” automakers – Ford, General Motors and Stellantis – to the collective US effort to manufacture military equipment for the Allies during World War II.
The president signaled his support for striking workers when he grabbed Fain’s bullhorn and shouted, “Wall Street doesn’t build the nation — the middle class builds the nation. Unions build the middle class. That’s a fact. So let’s continue. You deserve what you get and you’ve earned more than you’re getting now.”
The UAW, which has withheld its endorsement of Biden, has criticized his administration’s push to convert car buyers to foreign-made electric vehicles.
Biden is the first US president to visit the picket line. Reuters
Former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, will try to woo blue-collar voters in the Great Lake State Wednesday evening at a Detroit rally that his campaign says will be attended by about 500 autoworkers, plumbers, electricians and plumbers.
Trump held the event instead of participating in the second GOP primary debate.
“I LOVE, & WILL SAVE, AUTO WORKERS. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post ahead of the event.
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
