Biden is taking on MAGA Republicans in Boebert’s backyard
President Biden’s visit to a wind turbine factory in Colorado on Wednesday was both a rebuke of his far-right opponents in Congress and an official stop to show off investments in clean energy and manufacturing.
Mr. Biden toured CS Wind’s Pueblo plant, which is in the district of Rep. Lauren Boebert, a high-profile figure in the Republican Party’s provocative right wing. She has labeled the president’s climate policies “a colossal failure.”
“Do you all know that you are part of a colossal failure?” Mr. Biden asked the audience, prompting laughter.
“You are changing America,” he told the workers and guests present. “It all sounds like a huge fallacy by the congresswoman and her colleagues.”
Wednesday’s tour amounted to a choreographed political outing for Mr. Biden, designed both to highlight investments in an eroded manufacturing base and to hit back at the president’s most vocal opponents as his poll numbers dip in the 2024 race have collapsed.
While Ms. Boebert received the bulk of the president’s admonitions on Wednesday, he also spoke of her as a representative of the larger far-right coalition that has opposed his agenda, at times targeting Speaker Mike Johnson and former President Donald J. Trump added his agenda. list of hostile parties.
An outspoken but vulnerable Republican in an increasingly blue state who edged by about 500 votes in her reelection race last year, Ms. Boebert has emerged as an ideal foil for Mr. Biden with next year’s election less than a year away .
While the president’s climate bill has helped spur investment in politically attractive manufacturing jobs in the United States, some flagship projects have ended up in the backyards of his fiercest Republican critics in Congress, including Ms. Boebert and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.
Mr. Biden tapped into this dissonance on Wednesday, saying his policies were aimed at helping workers find good-paying jobs no matter where they lived. He reiterated his oft-quoted promise to be “president for all Americans.”
A spokesperson for Ms. Boebert did not respond to a request for comment.
While he emphasized the importance of an economy based on clean energy, the president said little on climate change, just days after refusing to participate in the two-week climate summit in Dubai known as COP28, which starts Thursday.
While the White House has had some major successes by courting big corporations with tax breaks and pioneering large-scale renewable energy projects, the clean energy boom is also showing signs of overheating .
By renewing calls for a minimum tax on billionaires and overhauling other economic proposals, Mr. Biden made clear that his focus was on job creation, and that those in Congress who opposed him were only hurting their own voters.
“When I think about climate, I think about jobs,” he told the crowd twice.
Flanked by sliding cranes draped with “Bidenomics” banners, Mr. Biden said the upcoming $200 million CS Wind plant expansion represented the benefits of his domestic economic agenda.
The project is partly funded by the climate bill signed by Mr. Biden, the Inflation Reduction Act, which Ms. Boebert has said should be repealed.
The expansion is estimated to create 850 jobs by 2026.