2016 Biden rebaptizes Clinton in Scranton In the city where both have roots, the veep and the nominee try to appeal to voters tempted by Trump.

SCRANTON, Pa. — No one ever really knows exactly what Joe Biden’s about to say, but Hillary Clinton wants him to keep saying it.

Their first campaign trail stop was, naturally, in this town: Clinton was baptized here, Biden grew up here, it is the nexus of both the geographic and demographic appeal which is her weak spot and is his essence — all in a state that Donald Trump needs if he is to have any real shot at winning in November.


Trump, campaigning in Pennsylvania last week, said he was sure he’d win unless there was voting fraud. They’ve got their numbers, he said, and his aides have kept seeding that conspiracy thinking since.

Rigged elections didn’t make the cut for this first stop of the 2016 Malarkey Tour. Just about everything else did as he finally dropped his favorite phrase, 20 minutes in, the crowd listening for it like waiting for Bruce Springsteen to play “Thunder Road.”

“To repeat myself: it's such a bunch of malarkey,” Biden said.

Biden’s made his mission for the election delivering the Senate back to Democrats, and he’s already made clear three seats that he’s prioritized, and where the party clearly needs help: for Ted Strickland in Ohio, for Patrick Murphy in Florida and for Katie McGinty in Pennsylvania.

Conveniently, those happen to be the three states where Clinton needs to block Trump on the electoral map, and where the Republican nominee’s message seems to be resonating in some of the most dangerous ways for the Clinton campaign.

“It’s good to be home,” Biden said, as he took the stage. Let me tell you what Scranton does deserve. … They deserve someone who not only understands, but who’s with them. They deserve someone who’s made of the same stuff. That’s Hillary Clinton.”

Two hours later, after a high-dollar fundraiser for Clinton in a giant house full of wood-carved walls, Biden drove home the point, bringing her with him for a visit to his childhood home.

He brought her into the kitchen, telling her stories of his grandfather pushing for votes among Democrats, summoning up his Aunt Gertie and a long night arguing over whether someone was going to turn Republican, which he remembered her shooting down with a knowing insistence that he wasn’t: “I saw him take Communion this morning.”

The main event wasn’t so sepia.

Clinton did her give-me-a-break sarcasm routine in her introduction: Trump claiming his businesses offered on-site child care, when in fact he meant his resorts offer spa and nanny care for the guests.

“Like so much of what he says, it’s not true,” Clinton said.

Biden picked up on some of the themes of his Trump evisceration from last month’s Democratic convention — what kind of person likes to say “You’re fired?” he wondered again — and Biden standards, like describing the “longest walk” a parent can take, up the short stairs to tell the children that the pink slip had come down.

Then he let rip with the new stuff.

“People say he lacks the temperament,” Biden said of Trump. “I’d feel better if that’s all he lacked.”

He looked back behind him on stage, to the aide he said carries the nuclear codes just in case something were to happen to President Barack Obama and he’d have to use them. Trump, he said, curling his arm into a fist and going into his patented Biden volume boom, “He is not qualified to know the code.”

“He would have loved Stalin,” he said, jumping on Trump’s admiration for Saddam Hussein’s killing terrorists.

“They’re worried,” Biden said of the NATO allies, several of whom he’ll be meeting with on two separate trips he’s taking to Europe — one to Serbia and Kosovo which starts late Monday, and another to Sweden, Latvia and Turkey which starts next week.

“The bad guys are listening,” he said of Trump’s claim that Obama and Clinton founded the Islamic State.

Biden’s most sensitive spot, though, is his son Beau, the former Delaware attorney general who died in spring of 2015 from brain cancer, sending him into an emotional spiral that led to his deep grief and almost convinced him to make the run for president that he’d always envisioned for his beloved son.

A year ago, Clinton was interrupting her summer vacation, trying to keep Biden from getting into a primary against her, Biden expressing doubts about whether she was the right person for the Oval Office. Monday, she was pumping both her arms in the air as she waited for him to come down the stairs off Air Force 2, greeting him with a wry, “Hello, my dear,” and holding him in a long, laughing, chatty embrace.

He broke into a smile when she said, “Vice President Biden has a saying,” quoting the line he always attributes to his father, “show me your budget and I’ll tell you what your values are,” but the line that seemed to resonate more was when she recalled his son, and said that she hoped to keep Biden on the cancer “moonshot” that Obama assigned him earlier in the year.

Instead of convincing him to run against Clinton, Biden said, his son was the argument for electing Clinton, and for all military parents and anyone else who cares about the troops to stop Trump from getting into the White House.

So as Trump started to deliver his foreign policy speech in Youngstown, Ohio, Biden went into a deeply personal story about the son in whose honor he’s going to Kosovo, where they’re renaming a street for Beau Biden, who while at the Department of Justice spent time as a legal adviser there, laying the foundation for the Kosovo Judicial Institute.

He was proud of his son’s service in Iraq, Biden said, glad he went.

But “had Donald Trump been president, I would have thrown my body in front of him to stop him from going,” Biden said.

And that, he added later, was what made him so worried about just laughing Trump off.

Biden read the comments from the Hezbollah leader who over the weekend expressed excitement that Trump had said Obama and Clinton founded ISIS — explaining itself as a reaction to Obama administration policies is a key element of the group’s origin narrative.

That matters now, Biden said, to the people who are serving today.

For soldiers in Iraq, Biden said, "the threat to their life has gone up a couple clicks."

Along the highway, a towing company had pulled up several trucks hanging Trump-Pence signs. The motorcade passed protesters holding more Trump signs, and a few handmade “Lock her up” signs at several points along the way.

“The story of the Rodhams and the Bidens isn’t unique. What’s unique is the country where those stories were written,” Clinton had said at the rally, rooting herself in Scranton values. “No matter what Donald Trump says, America is great, and the American dream is big enough for everyone to share in that promise.”

Asked as she left Biden’s childhood home whether she thought people with Scranton values could vote for Trump — as many in this area seem likely to do — Clinton tried to steer away from the question, going back to talking about how much the town loves the vice president and always has.

“People will make up their own minds,” she said. "Nobody will love Scranton more than I will as president."