WH targets Boehner

Timothy McNulty | July 8, 2009

The WashPost's WhoRunsGov blog has some extra dish on the Joe Biden Ohio trip we mentioned this morning -- it's partially a snub of stimulus-criticizing House Minority Leader John Boehner:

Biden's office has announced that he's traveling to Cincinnati tomorrow to highlight stimulus spending. But here's what it doesn't say in the Veep's press release: It turns out Biden's stimulus event is taking place right next door to the district of Boehner, who has proclaimed that the stimulus has flopped in his state.

That doesn't appear to be a coincidence.

Boehner has been one of the leading critics of the stimulus package, most recently claiming that no stimulus contracts had been let in his home state of Ohio, though some stim cash seems to have landed right in Boehner's district.

Biden is going tomorrow to Cincinnati, right next door to Boehner's district, to hold an event at a formerly abandoned factory that's being developed with stimulus money, where he'll highlight other recovery act cash being spent in the state.

A GOP aide scoffed at Biden's visit. "It'll be interesting to see how the Vice President defends the Administration's trillion-dollar `stimulus' that was supposed to create jobs `immediately' in a state that now has over 10 percent unemployment," he said.

Of course, Ohio also happens to be a state where Obama's numbers have dropped, and with the administration increasingly vulnerable to the GOP's attacks on the stimulus' failure to create jobs, more trips like this are likely. Boehner's claims about the stimulus, however, give this visit a fun political subplot.