WASHINGTON -- Vice President Joe Biden said President Barack Obama did "a great job" in Wednesday night's debate and slammed Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney for flip-flopping on all sorts of issues.
During a Thursday campaign event in Council Bluffs, Iowa, Biden praised Obama's performance in his first of three debates with Romney.
The president gave Americans "a clear, specific plan how to get this country moving forward again," Biden told the crowd.
He also spoke to reporters ahead of Thursday's event and threw support behind Obama's performance, which many Republicans and Democrats have said was surprisingly lackluster.
"I think the president did well," Biden told reporters, according to pool reports. "He was presidential."
By contrast, he said, Romney was all over the place with his proposals. He addressed the subject of Romney's tax plan, which calls for a 20 percent across-the-board reduction in marginal tax rates, plus the elimination of the estate tax and the alternative minimum tax. A study by the non-partisan Tax Policy Center projects the plan will amount to a $5 trillion tax cut over 10 years, but Romney denied during the debate that the tax cut would be that large and repeated his claim that he would eliminate enough deductions to counteract it. As Obama pointed out, however, not enough deductions exist to accomplish this.
"Last night we found out he doesn’t have a 5 trillion tax cut," Biden said. "I guess he outsourced that to China or something, I don’t know, that’s offshored. But it’s hard to figure out what Gov. Romney’s position is on a number of issues."
"Gov. Romney has either changed a number of his positions or didn’t remember some of his positions," Biden continued. "I think at the end of the day we have two more debates coming up, or the president does and I feel very good about it."
Asked about next week's vice presidential debate, Biden said it would be "tough," but added that he's eager to go toe-to-toe with Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan.
"The thing about Congressman Ryan is he's been straightforward up to now," he said. "We have a fundamentally different view on a whole range of issues, so I hope it will be a fun debate."
Biden said he has been preparing for his debate by studying up on Ryan's positions on the issues.
"I don’t want to say anything in the debate that’s not completely accurate," he said.
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