"We don't have to go out and spend $30 trillion to deal with health care," he said, referring to the supposed price tag of Medicare-for-all. His own plan would cost only a tiny fraction of that, $740 billion over 10 years, meaning it would also cover only a tiny fraction of those left with little or no coverage under Obamacare.
He likewise rejected calls for eliminating college student debt. "I don't think everybody should have a free college education, but I do think we're in a position where for $6 billion a year, you can put every single qualified person that needed to go back to community college to get an education, or go to community college in the first place," he claimed.
Biden went out of his way to conciliate with congressional Republicans, recalling that under the Obama administration he was the principal liaison to figures like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. "There's an awful lot of really good Republicans out there," he said. "They're decent people. They ran because they care about things, but they're intimidated right now." If Trump were defeated, he claimed, these Republicans would be open to working with a Democratic administration.
This weekend, Biden has made further appearances at fundraisers, including one Friday at the summer home of Peter Shields, managing partner of the Washington, DC law firm Wiley Rein, at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. On Saturday he was in the Hamptons, at a fundraiser attended by former White House press secretary Anthony Scaramucci, another Manhattan multi-millionaire, who said that he was still a registered Republican and not yet ready to announce support for Biden, but praised him and declared that President Trump "has lost his mind."
Biden has already appeared at elite fundraisers in Aspen, Colorado, Sun Valley, Idaho and Cape Cod, according to media reports.
Next weekend, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg will attend a series of fundraising events in the Hamptons, including an August 31 "Cocktails & Conversation with Mayor Pete & Chasten Buttigieg" at the East Hampton home of Robert Marc and Gunnar Spaulding, with Friends of the High Line board chair Mario Palumbo and his JPMorgan executive husband, Stefan Gargiulo, as co-hosts.
Buttigieg will also appear at the Sagaponack home of "Hamilton" producers Jeffrey Seller and Josh Lehrer, and at an event hosted by Insight Partners managing director Deven Parekh and his wife, Monika.
While Harris, Biden, Booker and Buttigieg dominate the Wall Street funding, their two main "left" rivals, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have sworn off high-dollar fundraisers in favor of online contributions. This reflects a division of labor among the Democratic presidential candidates.
Warren and Sanders seek to give a left face to a fundamentally right-wing party of big business. Disavowing direct contributions from Wall Street is part of the pretense. Warren has already indicated that if she wins the nomination, she will not engage in "unilateral disarmament" in the general election campaign against Trump: in other words, she will rake in as much corporate and Wall Street cash as possible. Sanders will do the same in the event he wins the nomination, but the question has not yet been directly posed to him.
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