Speaking to ABC’s “This Week,” Biden said he believes the vice president’s role is to provide “the best, sagest, most accurate, most insightful advice and recommendations he or she can make to a president to help them make some of the very, very important decisions that have to be made.”
On Sunday, Obama’s transition team announced the new “White House Task Force on Working Families” — a major initiative targeted at “raising the living standards of middle-class, working families in America.”
Vice President-elect Joe Biden will chair a new task force aimed at helping working families.
Other members of the task force will include the secretaries of labor, health and human services, and commerce, as well as the directors of the National Economic Council, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Domestic Policy Counsel, and the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors.
In an interview with ABC’s “This Week,” Biden said it’s a “discrete job that’s going to last only for a certain period of time.”
“The one thing that we use as a yardstick of economic success of our administration: Is the middle class growing? Is the middle class getting better? Is the middle class no longer being left behind? And we’ll look at everything from college affordability to after-school programs, the things that affect people’s daily lives. I will be the guy honchoing that policy,” he said.
Biden said he will have the authority to get a consensus among the task force — but will use his relationship with the president if a consensus isn’t reached.
“If in fact there is no consensus, [I’d] go to the president of the United States and say, ‘Mr. President, I think we should be doing this, cabinet member so-and-so thinks that. You’re going to have to resolve what it is we think we should do.’ ”
From Ed Hornick and Josh Levs
CNN
Read the rest:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/12
/21/transition.wrap/index.html?eref=rss_topstories
Related:
Obama Creates Task Force for Working Families
Biden: “Working Families Czar”
http://atimetochoose.wordpress.com/2008/12/21/bide
n-working-families-czar-how-appropriate/
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