Biden Takes on MAGA Republicans in Boebert’s Backyard

Biden Takes on MAGA Republicans in Boebert’s Backyard - The New York Times

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Biden Takes on MAGA Republicans in Boebert’s Backyard

President Biden toured a wind turbine factory in a far-right lawmaker’s Colorado district and rebuked critics who have opposed his clean energy and economic agenda.

Reporting from Pueblo, Colo.

President Biden’s visit to a wind turbine factory in Colorado on Wednesday was as much a rebuke of his far-right opponents in Congress as it was an official stop to show off investments in clean energy and manufacturing.

Mr. Biden toured the Pueblo factory of CS Wind, which lies in the district of Representative Lauren Boebert, a high-profile figure in the Republican Party’s provocative right wing. She has characterized the president’s climate policies as “a massive failure.”

“You all know you’re part of a massive failure?” Mr. Biden asked the crowd, drawing laughs.

“You’re changing America,” he told the workers and guests in attendance. “It all sounds like a massive failure of thinking by the congresswoman and her colleagues.”

The tour on Wednesday amounted to a choreographed political appearance for Mr. Biden, designed to both highlight investments in an eroded manufacturing base as well as to hit back at the president’s most vocal opponents as his polling has sagged in the 2024 race.

While Ms. Boebert received the bulk of the president’s admonishments on Wednesday, he also spoke of her as a proxy for the larger far-right coalition that has opposed his agenda, at times adding Speaker Mike Johnson and former President Donald J. Trump to his list of hostile parties.

An outspoken but vulnerable Republican in an increasingly blue state who squeaked by in her re-election race last year by around 500 votes, Ms. Boebert has emerged as an ideal foil for Mr. Biden with next year’s election less than a year away.

As the president’s climate bill has helped spur investments in politically attractive manufacturing jobs in the United States, some flagship projects have wound up in the backyards of his harshest G.O.P. critics in Congress, including Ms. Boebert and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

Mr. Biden seized on that dissonance on Wednesday, saying that his policies were designed to help workers find well-paying jobs wherever they lived, reiterating his oft-cited promise to be “president for all Americans.”

A spokesman for Ms. Boebert did not respond to a request for comment.

Even as he stressed the importance of an economy built on clean energy, the president said little about climate change, just days after declining to attend the two-week climate summit in Dubai known as COP28 that begins on Thursday.

While the White House has logged some major successes courting major companies with tax incentives and breaking ground on large-scale renewable energy projects, the clean energy boom has also showed signs of overheating.

Calling again for a minimum tax on billionaires and revisiting other economic proposals, Mr. Biden made clear that his focus was on job creation, and that those in Congress opposing him were only hurting their own constituents.

“When I think climate, I think jobs,” he told the crowd — twice.

Flanked by sliding cranes draped with “Bidenomics” banners, Mr. Biden said that the CS Wind plant’s forthcoming $200 million expansion represented the benefits of his domestic economic agenda.

The project is being funded in part by Mr. Biden’s signature climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, which Ms. Boebert has said should be repealed.

The expansion will create an estimated 850 jobs by 2026.

Zach Montague is based in Washington. He covers breaking news and developments around the district. More about Zach Montague

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