On Tuesday, speaking at a rally in Danville, Va., Vice President Joe Biden told a group of supporters that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney would "put you all back in chains" if elected.
The vice president was arguing that Republicans plan to "unchain Wall Street" with deregulation.
"He said in the first hundred days, he's going to let the big banks once again write their own rules, unchain Wall Street," Biden said during a speech at the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research. "They're going to put you all back in chains."
The Romney campaign took issue with the comments.
"After weeks of slanderous and baseless accusations leveled against Governor Romney, the Obama Campaign has reached a new low," Romney press secretary Andrea Saul said in a statement. "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. President Obama should tell the American people whether he agrees with Joe Biden's comments."
A spokeswoman from the Obama campaign defended Biden's remarks, saying there was "no problem" with the accusation.
"For months, Speaker Boehner, Congressman Ryan, and other Republicans have called for the 'unshackling' of the private sector from regulations that protect Americans from risky financial deals and other reckless behavior that crashed our economy," said Obama spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter. "Since then, the Vice President has often used a similar metaphor to describe the need to 'unshackle' the middle class. Today's comments were a derivative of those remarks, describing the devastating impact letting Wall Street write its own rules again would have on middle class families. We find the Romney campaign's outrage over the Vice President's comments today hypocritical, particularly in light of their own candidate's stump speech questioning the President's patriotism. Now, let's return to that 'substantive' debate Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan promised 72 hours ago, but quickly abandoned."