Biden warns Dems: Don't let GOP steal credit for economic recovery

Democrats, beware: Republicans are beginning to recognize the economic recovery you helped facilitate at great political cost. And they'll try to take credit for it, if they can.

That's the warning Vice President Biden delivered to House Democrats at their retreat in Philadelphia on Friday.

Biden acknowledged the heavy losses Democrats sustained during the last two midterm elections. "A lot of my friends and your friends in this caucus aren't here today, because they had the nerve to stand up and do what they thought was right, knowing...they were gonna be in trouble," he said.

But with economic growth and job creation gathering steam, Biden added, "it's becoming clearer and clearer that the decisions you made...were the right decisions."

"Mark my words: the Republican Party is going to try to claim this resurgence," he predicted, "and they're going to misrepresent that it's because of...policies that they supported."

Biden panned the GOP's claim to the recovery as "malarkey," but he warned, "If we don't speak up and reassert the case we made, it may stick politically."

The vice president roasted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's recent observation that new economic data provide a "glimmer of hope."

"Mitch, it's recovery," he said. "It ain't hope, it's recovery."

He also mocked McConnell's recent suggestion that the economic uptick "appears to coincide" with the GOP takeover of the Senate, drawing laughter from the lawmakers in the room.

""We've moved from disaster to recovery to resurgence," he said. "Now the Republican Party is - it's amazing - they're trying to rewrite history."

The vice president was fiery and emphatic, his voice rising in anger as he indicted the Republican Party's economic prescriptions.

He reserved particular scorn for the GOP argument that hiking taxes on capital gains, as President Obama proposed in his State of the Union, would penalize job creators and discourage capital investment.

"Since when did stockholders become the job creators?" Biden asked.

"Stockholders, good -- we need stockholders...wish I owned some," he added. But "The line worker, the salesman...they build the economy too."

Biden said the government should focus on helping the middle class to create the broad-based prosperity necessary to sustain an economic recovery.

"When the middle class does well - you all know it - the wealthy do very well," he said. "That's the way we build this economy: from the middle out, not the top down."