The Vice-President at Penn.

Vice President (of America) Joe Biden rubbed elbows with Mayor Nutter, Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, the director of National Drug Control Policy and chiefs of fire and police from the tri-state area yesterday.

Biden and his band of advisers, staff and Secret Service are touring the country to drum up support for Obama’s Job Act. Since it’s stalled in Congress against the hell-no of the GOP, what can’t be pushed through the halls of Congress must be pushed for by the people. And he’s asking liberals to push it real good.

He’s lending his presence in meetings coast to coast, in smallish venues such as the University of Pennsylvania’s Houston Hall, where he met behind closed doors with the brass. Then he held a press conference to a roomful of media and students who herded around him for handshakes and photos after the speech like he was Beyonce, or Elvis. If you were unsuccessfully trying to drive or walk anywhere down the 3400 block of Spruce Street yesterday afternoon, that’s why you couldn’t.

Biden talked to his crowd like they were his buddies, then suddenly hurled words of fury that raised his complexion to scarlet and turned his voice to a yell that tapered as soon as it came. “The opposition,” he said, seething, “wouldn’t even allow us to debate it.”

The bill’s premise lies on the same premise of the New Deal: The government spends a lot during the economic depression to kick-start the economy. Or at least stave off starvation. In this bill’s terms, Obama would invest $447 billion (yes, nearly half a trillion dollars) to ostensibly bail us out. It would provide payroll tax cuts, put $35 billion toward teachers and first responders, invest in infrastructure and extend unemployment benefits. Obama and Biden mean to fund such investment by taxing people who make a million dollars or more per year an extra five percent—or $500 for each million.

Biden and Nutter.

With the bill was blocked by a filibuster, Obama and Biden will have to introduce it in pieces. Philadelphia’s theme was law enforcement.

Biden used the public-safety angle presumably because the depression (oh, sorry, recession) breeds “drugs and guns.” Biden painted a picture of cops filled with pained compassion when he said the first thing the chiefs of police and fire wanted to talk about was “drugs and rehabilitation.”

When Ramsey introduced the VP, he said Biden’s Crime Act of 1994 “got 100,000 cops on the street of our city. Over the past decade and a half we’ve seen a drastic reduction of crime in our country.”

With cops and firefighters from Atlantic City and Camden flanking him from all sides, the VP derided the “folks who don’t want to compromise.”

“Fewer cops make it easier to commit crimes,” he said. Crime causes housing prices to crash. Worthless housing results in more blight and despair. Poverty makes everything terrible. “It’s a perfect downward spiral.”

He also reminded his gathered masses at Penn, where his daughter studied social work, that his critics better “pray to God you’re not on the other end of a gun.”

It’s not surprising that Republicans are blocking him from raising taxes on millionaires and billionaires. It’s also not surprising that instead of ending the wars Obama promised to end during his campaign—which have cost more than a trillion dollars so far—our government has used nearly a billion dollars that could be going toward police and fire personnel toward a military operation in Libya.

Well, at least our government can accomplish some things in a bi-partisan fashion.