PITTSBURGH _ Speaking before 600 people at Chatham University on Tuesday, Vice President Joe Biden said he didn't want to devote much time to Republican presidential nominee.
"I'm so tired, and so disturbed, quite frankly, because of ... all the attention has been drawn to this ridiculousness," he said.
Biden's 40-minute speech did launch several salvos at Donald Trump, while offering an optimistic vision of the country under Democrat Hillary Clinton. And as Clinton herself did last weekend, he weighed in on a key Pennsylvania Senate race.
"I love the Senate," said Biden, who served there before becoming vice president. "But it has been rendered almost nonfunctioning of late." Giving Democrats control of the chamber, he predicted, would break a partisan logjam there.
Biden praised Democratic Senate challenger Katie McGinty, whom he hailed for having "a backbone like a ramrod."
By contrast, he said, incumbent Republican Pat Toomey "is a decent guy," but one who hadn't taken a position on Trump's candidacy. "(H)is refusing to disavow Donald Trump, that's consent" to Trump's behavior, Biden said. "Silence is consent."
Biden said Trump was "thoroughly unqualified" for the presidency. "Can you imagine any president getting up at 3:30 in the morning and tweeting vitriol about a former Miss Universe?" asked Biden, referring to Trump's social media attack on Alicia Machado.
The Trump camp fired back with a statement that "Hillary Clinton just can't close the deal with Pennsylvania voters." Citing Biden's recent assertion that he would like to take Trump "behind the gym," the Trump campaign said "voters have had enough of Biden's negative rhetoric, and want a president with a positive message."
Biden did acknowledge that Americans of modest means had been hurting. "The middle class has got the living hell kicked out of them the past 15 years," he said. And the vice president, a Scranton native, recalled that in the late 1900s, "I walked by so many padlocked factories, where they were unbolting machinery from the floor (to) be sent overseas. They called it outsourcing, and people where I came from got battered by it."
Challenges remained, he said, including child care costs that often kept parents from working: "Child care in Pennsylvania, average cost $14,700 for a family with two kids. That's why women aren't in the workforce."
But he predicted that if Clinton were elected, "You'll see a renaissance in America like you haven't seen in five decades."
Chatham, formerly a women's college that went co-ed last year, offered a welcome climate to a pro-Hillary message. Several students agreed that Trump's remarks about women _ and recent allegations that he has accosted multiple women _ had galvanized campus opinion even more. (Trump has denied the accusations.)
"Our campus was half-Bernie, half-Hillary," said senior Alexis McKenna, referring to Clinton's primary rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. "Trump's awful statements have been a big part of unifying it."
"Now it's personal," agreed Carina Stopenski, a Chatham senior who said she was already "so excited to vote for a woman."
Dana Brown, executive director of Chatham's Pennsylvania Center for Women and Politics, agreed that Trump had hurt his prospects with female voters: "I'm curious to see if in 2016 we have not just a gender gap, but a gender grand canyon."
In fact, she said, "Given that (Biden) was speaking on the Chatham campus, I was surprised there wasn't more about women's issues." But "the students were so enthusiastic to have him on campus."
Chatham last had a vice presidential visit in 1995, when Al Gore stopped by. President William Taft spoke to students in 1910, when the school was known as the Pennsylvania College for Women.
"For a lot of students, this is the first time they can vote in a presidential election," Brown said. "They'll remember this forever."
