Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) said President Donald Trump should provide more focus on his economic record in upcoming presidential debates, offering her commentary on Wednesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.
“The president also needs to talk more about what he did to lift people out of poverty,” Blackburn urged. “In 2019, we had some of the lowest poverty rates ever. Historical low in these poverty rates, and these are huge accomplishments, and I want the American people to be reminded of what a good year 2019 was, how well we were doing in February 2020 before COVID-19 hit our country.”
National poverty rates declined in 2019 to 10.5 percent, down 1.3 percent relative to 2018, according to the Census Bureau. It was the fifth consecutive annual decline in poverty.
Blackburn added, “What the president is going to have to do is tout his record and push forward with those specifics in the next debate.”
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Blackburn highlighted Joe Biden’s expressed support and opposition of the Green New Deal during Tuesday’s presidential debate as illustrative of the former vice president’s duplicity. Biden said, “The Green New Deal will pay for itself.” Seconds later, he said, “I do not support the Green New Deal.”
“We’re talking about a man who cannot say what his agenda is,” Blackburn said of Biden. “He was on both sides of the Green New Deal last night. He was for it, but then he said that wasn’t his plan, but then he turned around and he defended it. He was all over the place on that. That is because [Biden] does not want to tell the American people what he would do on energy.”
Blackburn highlighted Biden’s false denial of a “manifesto” policy document composed by his and Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) campaigns as illustrative of the Democrat nominee’s dishonesty. Both Biden and Sanders released a “unity task force” policy platform in July as part of a political overture to supporters of the Vermont senator.
Blackburn observed the conduct of Fox News Channel’s Chris Wallace as the moderator of the first presidential debate.
“It was as if the president was debating Chris Wallace and Joe Biden, and I was disappointed that Chris Wallace kept calling the president down, but would not call Joe Biden down,” Blackburn remarked. “He’d let [Biden] off the hook [over whether] he was going to support law and order, if he was going to vote to fund the police or defund the police, if he was going to have nine Supreme Court justices or if he was going to support court packing.”