Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday warned that presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s financial policies would put voters “back in chains.”

At a campaign stop in Virginia, the vice president told a crowd — which included many African Americans — that Romney was “going to let the big banks once again write their own rules, unchain Wall Street.”

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“They’re going to put you all back in chains,” he said.

Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul quickly accused the Obama campaign of reaching “a new low.”

“The comments made by the Vice President of the United States are not acceptable in our political discourse and demonstrate yet again that the Obama campaign will say and do anything to win this election,” Saul said in a statement.

A statement from the Obama campaign explained that Biden was “clearly using a metaphor to describe the devastating impact of deregulating Wall Street and the financial industry, as well as how Governor Romney’s policies would take us back to the same failed formula that led to the 2008 financial crisis.”

Watch this video from C-SPAN, broadcast Aug. 14, 2012.