The November election presents a choice between “whether America remains America” or falls to socialism, Vice President Mike Pence said during a stop in southeastern Wisconsin.
In a 36-minute speech delivered from the Tankcraft Corp. in Darien, Pence regularly knocked Joe Biden on a number of fronts, telling the audience the Dem presidential nominee would raise taxes, cost Wisconsin jobs and appoint “activist judges” that would legislate from the bench. Pence also criticized Biden for saying law enforcement has an implicit bias against minorities and drew a sharp contrast with President Trump, who he said “will always back the blue.”
He also knocked the decision to hold the Democratic National Convention also entirely virtually, drawing applause and cheers from the audience when he noted Dems “couldn’t make it” to the state for their convention.
“Where the other side’s online, we’re going to be on the streets in the Badger state,” he said.
But beyond criticism of Biden, Pence framed the upcoming election as an existential choice between the “path of freedom, free markets, liberties, and life” and the “path of socialism and decline.”
“The truth is Joe Biden, the Democratic Party have been overtaken by the radical left,” he said. “Their agenda would take this country in a dramatically different direction, on an inexorable path towards socialism and decline.”
Pence also touted President Trump’s first term in office as three-and-a-half years of action, results and delivered promises. He praised Trump for the country’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, reviving American manufacturing and the military, cutting taxes and government regulations and implementing the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement trade deal.
“It really is amazing to think with the support of the people of Wisconsin, in those first three years we’re reversing the policies of the last administration,” he said.
Ahead of Pence’s stop, Dems knocked the Trump administration’s policies toward the ag industry, saying they’ve made things worse for farmers as the state has faced a stream of closures and bankruptcy filings.
Darin Von Ruden, president of the Wisconsin Farmers Union, noted the president said a year ago dairy farmers were “over the hump.” But Trump’s botched response to COVID-19 hasn’t helped, and the changes in the trade deal he negotiated with Mexico and Canada were so small that they’ve been undercut by the president’s trade wars.
“Yes, trade deals need to be renegotiated,” said Von Ruden, who has a 50-cow farm in southwestern Wisconsin. “But you don’t start wars over negotiations. You work through the process and work with your counterparts in other countries to make sure that consumers and the farmers and the manufactures and the line workers are all treated fairly in the whole process.”
