By JOHN NORTH

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Vice President Joe Biden emphasized growing the economy and creating middle-class jobs, while slamming his and President Barack Obama’s Republican rivals —whom he characterized as extremist conservatives who are out-of-touch with the American people — during his Oct. 2 campaign swing through Asheville.

Biden’s visit filled all of the 1,100 seats in UNC Asheville’s Justice Center, with a total attendance estimated at 1,320, with another 200 people viewing the action in an overflow room. (The Justice Center was used because UNCA is leasing its new Kimmel Arena, with 3,400 seats, to the Charlotte Bobcats professional basketball team for preseason practices.)

The vice president’s address began about 30 minutes late — and was preceded by speeches from U.S. Rep. Heath Shuler, D-Waynesville; Democratic Lt. Gov. Walter Dalton and others. Campaign hoopla in Justice began 2-1/2 hours before Biden finally took the stage at 4 p.m.

Greeted with roaring applause, Biden called his “friends” Shuler and Dalton to join him on the stage. Dalton is running for governor, while Shuler is not running again.

”It’s not an exaggeration to suggest that the nation faces the starkest choice for president in my lifetime,” Biden said, adding that the result will have “a profound impact on social policies, particularly for women and minorities.”

Regarding Obama and his GOP rival Mitt Romney, the vice president said, “They’re both good men — good family men and good husbands. But that’s where the similarities end.”

Biden charged that when Romney chose Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., for his vice presidential running mate, he signaled the extremist conservative direction in which he would head.

The largely partisan crowd laughed in derision when the vice president said that Romney claimed to have picked Ryan because “he was the intellectual center of the Republican Party ... So when Gov. Romney picked him (Ryan), all of a sudden, all of the blanks got filled in.”

He reiterated, “Ladies and gentlemen, the differences (between the political positions of the two sets of candidates) is immense.”

Noting that he is “supposed to be an expert on foreign policy, Biden told of being at a recent closed conference, when he was asked, “What is America to do?”

Biden said he responded, “America has to be the best-educated nation in the world.” The crowd, which included a number of UNCA students, faculty and staff, applauded loudly.

He said his wife Jill, a schoolteacher, likes to say, “‘Any nation that out-educates us will out-compete us.’ It’s in our national interest that we move from 14th in the world back to No. 1 again” in the percentage of the population holding college degrees.

Biden said Obama and he had set the goal for the U.S. to be No. 1 by 2020, again eliciting applause from the crowd. “We can’t compete unless we’re better-educated,” he asserted.

To that end, the vice president said the U.S. has about 600,000 jobs “out there waiting” because there is a scarcity of people with the training to fill them.

He lamented the government paying the banks $60 billion to repay college loans, and said “the Republicans didn’t like it, but we took $6 million of that for Pell Grants.”

After a pause, Biden added, “I understand that here in Asheville, you’ve got the lowest percentage of (college loan) debt ... We’d like to get the rest of the country like that.

“None of us would be where we are today if it had not been for loans, as well as scholarships and, by the way, we don’t think that encourages a culture of dependency....

“Children tend to become what you expect of them — and we expect” them to do well.  “For Romney and Ryan, education is an after-thought,” Biden charged.

In another jab at his rivals, the vice president said, “If you listen to them (the Republican ticket), you wonder — this recession ... How did it happen?”

He accused the Republicans of putting “two wars on a credit card ... and a trillion-dollar tax cut for millionaires ... The result is they left us with a trillion-dollar debt in our first year” with Obama at the helm.

“Look,” Biden said, “Romney and Ryan people who are here today will say Biden is always playing the blame game ... As my grandmother used to say: ‘You can’t solve a problem unless you know what caused the problem.’

“So it shouldn’t be a surprise that their policies of these hemorraging tax cuts got us into this problem.”

He added, “Look, folks, these people (Romney and Ryan) act like compromise is a dirty word.”

On the bright side, Biden said with tongue in cheek, “At this (GOP) convention, they discovered the middle class.”

In contrast, the vice president said that Obama and he know very well about the middle class — and hold it is high esteem. The crowd cheered.

“My grandfather used to say: ‘Show me your budget and I’ll show you what you value.’”

Biden then charged that Romney and Ryan want to turn Medicare into a private voucher system. In an effort to win support from their consituency, he said the pair want to institute “massive tax cuts,” even though “they (the rich) didn’t ask for the tax cuts — and they don’t need them.”

With a note of sarcasm, the vice president prompted laughter from the audience when he said, “These guys (the rich), I guess, are also the job creators.” 

Biden then said that experts have claimed that, if Romney and Ryan were able to enact their tax plan, “each (middle-class) family (in North Carolina) would lose $2,000 in tax cuts ... The middle class has done enough. It’s not the time to lay the burden on the middle class.” The crowd erupted into loud applause.

“We’ve seen this movie before ... and we’re not going back,” he said. “We’re not going back — that’s a promise ... We’re going to start doubling our exports — that means jobs, sending products made in America overseas.”

“This isn’t rocket science,” Biden said regarding solving America’s problems. “We’ve got the most productive workers” in the world — “three times as productive as the workers in China ... We need to be not just the most productive, but the best-trained” people in the world, he said.

The crowd jumped to its feet to cheer when Biden reiterated that “it’s time the rich help with the (national) debt,” which he said Obama want to cut by $4 trillion through the rest of the decade.

Contrary to the view of his GOP rivals, Biden said, “Folks, there is no quit in America!” However, Romney and Ryan, he said, believe that 47 percent of Americans regard themselves as victims and dependent on the government.

To cheers, Biden said, “I don’t recognize the country they’re talking about ... We are so much better and so much more responsible ... Ladies and gentlemen, America is neither dependent nor in decline.”