Photo: CWA President Larry Cohen introduces Biden for noon-hour speech.

Fresh from a baseball game, still in his uniform, high school senior Joe Biden pulled his candy apple red ’51 Plymouth into the lot of Porter Chevrolet, the car dealership his father managed in Newark, Del.

A perk of having a dad in the car business, Biden was there to borrow an even snazzier ride to take his date to the prom. His father, a “graceful, well-read man with a high-school education,” was in the side lot, looking troubled.

“My dad was pacing back and forth and he looked up at me said, ‘Joey, I’m so sorry.” Young Biden worried that something had happened to someone in their family.

His father told him he’d gone to Farmers Bank, which financed many of the cars he sold. He’d tried to borrow money to send his son to college. The bank turned him down. “I don’t know what I’m going to do, pal,” his dad told him. “I’m so ashamed.”

The look in his father’s eyes, the hurt he felt, has stayed with Joe Biden for decades. At CWA’s Legislative-Political Conference Feb. 2, he offered the anecdote as a way of explaining how much is at stake for struggling middle-class families today.

“The worst moment for a parent is when you turn and look at your beautiful child and know something is important to their future, whether it’s their health or their education, and know there’s not a damn thing you can do to help them,” Biden said.

Although Biden’s family worked out a way to get him to college, it’s never erased his memory of that day. “At that moment, my father’s image of himself was shattered in front of his son,” he said.

As he’s often done when speaking to CWA meetings, Biden began with a happier reminiscence – how CWA was the first union to endorse him when Biden, barely a decade beyond his high school prom, first ran for the U.S. Senate.  He won that election in 1972 and spent 36 years in the Senate before President Obama asked him to be his running mate.

Shortly before Biden’s speech, the CWA Executive Board announced it was endorsing Obama-Biden for re-election after soliciting input from members online for nearly two months. TNG-CWA President Bernie Lunzer abstained from the vote, standard practice for the Guild with regard to political endorsements.

“Thank you, CWA. Thank you for your endorsement, but thank you for more than that,” Biden said with affection. “You still have a heart. You still get what it means to an awful lot of people out there who go to bed and stare at the ceiling wondering, “Am I going to be able to keep this house? Am I going to have to call my daughter or son at the state university and say I can’t afford it anymore? Am I still going to have my job?’”

Addressing those questions and more, Biden’s speech touched on the revival of the U.S. auto industry, 23 months of private-sector job growth and Obama’s recess appointments keeping the National Labor Relations Board alive. As some Republican candidates for president pledge to demolish the Board, anti-union obstructionists in Congress have tried to shut it down by refusing to approve Obama’s nominees.

The job growth includes offshored work returning to the United States, such as 1,000 IUE-CWA jobs making GE refrigerators and water heaters. Biden laid out a case for more of that happening.

“They figured out that separating R&D and innovation from the factory floor is a mistake, that’s where innovations occur,” he said. “They don’t want to send innovation overseas because it may get stolen. The cost of shipping is going up and it makes less and less sense to ship products across the ocean, especially those products ultimately destined to be consumed in the United States.”

Add that to labor costs rising 20 percent a year in China, stronger intellectual property and legal protections in the United States, and the Obama administration’s determination to end tax breaks for companies that move jobs overseas.

But on top of all that, Biden said, is what business executives told him at a recent summit. “The one thing they repeated is that we have the most productive workers in the world. That is not hyperbole. That is not being ‘nice’ to labor. We have the most productive workers in the world.”

He’s hopeful that means, “that your kids are going to hear the word ‘insourcing’ as often as you’ve heard the word ‘outsourcing.’”

Biden’s 50-minute speech wasn’t overtly partisan; he even stressed that he personally likes many of his political opponents.  But he sees their ideas as unworkable.

“Our Republican friends say we could get a whole lot more jobs created if we paid people the minimum wage, if we paid them just $10 an hour,” he said. “But guys, that’s not what the middle class is about. That’s not what builds the middle class. You’ve got to make and have enough money to own a home, to send your kid to college, to live in a safe neighborhood.”

Home ownership is especially fundamental, he said, noting that no one grows up in America dreaming of “renting a nice place.” He provided some of the nuts-and-bolts of a program Obama hinted at in the State of the Union speech, a way to encourage banks to refinance mortgages and “repay the deficit of trust” they created when taxpayers bailed them out.

The program will help Americans – likely including many CWA members, Biden said -- who’ve been paying their mortgages on time every month but have been unable to refinance at a lower interest rate because they’re underwater, owing more than their home is now worth.

Up to now, banks have been turning down homeowners in exactly that predicament. “The president had a great idea – a trust,” Biden explained. “With a very, very small fee, literally pennies on a hundred dollars for banks with assets over $50 billion, we can create a fund, about $9 billion. The details are still being worked out, but it won’t cost the taxpayers a penny.”

Soon, he said. “You’ll be able to go down to your local banker and they can’t say anymore that they can’t take a chance, because the fund will back it up.” On average, refinancing would put $3,000 a year into the pockets of 14 million homeowners.

It’s one path toward restoring basic fairness in the United States, Biden said, the sense that if you work hard and play by the rules, you’ll be OK.

It brings back for him another memory of his dad, earlier in his childhood when the family was living with his grandparents in Scranton. At his son’s bedside one night, his dad said, “Joe, I’m going to move away for a year. I’m going to Wilmington. Uncle Frank’s down there. There are jobs down there, honey. It’s only 157 miles away and I’ll come home almost every weekend. And when I get a little bit of money, when I get a job, I’m going to bring you, your mom, Val and Jimmy down. “

Biden said, “I was disappointed as hell, but my dad looked at me and said, ‘It’s going to be OK.’ He wasn’t full of woe. It wasn’t tragic. He believed it was going to be OK. I don’t know if very many people in my old neighborhood could make that same walk upstairs today and have the same confidence that my dad had.”

His goal as vice president is to see that confidence restored. “When I joined the ticket I said, “I’ll judge whether we’ve succeeded or not by whether people are able to turn to their kids and say what my dad said to me.”

And then he brought his message full circle. “To do that, we need you,” he said. “We need unions. Unions built the middle class and unions provide that kind of jobs that even when workers aren’t organized, they benefit.”