Just as the President is gearing his rhetoric for combat with the Republican No Deal Party which won’t pass his new jobs plan, the Vice-President is muddying the message:

Vice President Joe Biden acknowledges that it’s time to hold the Obama administration’s feet to the fire for the sorry state of the U.S. economy instead of continuing to blame President George W. Bush.

“Right now, understandably — totally legitimate — this is a referendum on Obama and Biden and the nature of the state of the economy, ” Biden said during an interview with South Florida public radio station WLRN this afternoon.

Biden made the startling comment during an interview in which his main goal was to pitch for support of President Barack Obama’s American Jobs Act.

The vice president dismissed polls in which people continue to blame the Bush administration for the economy.

“Even though 50-some percent of the American people think that the economy tanked because of the last administration, that’s not relevant, ” Biden said. “What’s relevant is we’re in charge. And right now we are the ones in charge and it’s gotten better, but it hasn’t gotten good enough.” (September 29, 2011 Newsmax Wire)

Biden has not received the message that turning the other cheek is no longer strategy. To the contrary, what the White House needs to do is to repudiate the past regime. The economy is not progressing because of the enormous failures of neo-liberal ideology as a philosophy for governing the country. The failures are well-known – the gross irresponsibility of the financial CEOs, the regulatory failures to prevent dangerous food in the food supply, the failure of the tax code to get the extremely rich and powerful to pay their fair share, the scape-goating of the unionized middle-class, the BP blow-out in the Gulf, the enormous unfunded expense of the war in Iraq, and on and on. These are Republican problems caused by Republican policies and the President is not responsible for them. Without repudiation of the past policies, the Democrats cannot change the subject and take the country in a new direction.