Is it me or is Joe Biden accusing tea partiers of being cavemen?

ANNANDALE, Va. — Vice President Joe Biden on Monday delivered a closing pitch for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, painting the Virginia race as a major test of the mainstream electorate’s answer to a resurgent tea party.

”This race has captured the attention of the entire nation,” Biden said. “Not just because it’s a …race in a bellwether state that has become the face of progress in this country. But because it’s the first major race between the forces and faces of the new Republican tea party — a tea party whose social recidivism is only outgunned by its hostility to science and technology and innovation and scholarship.”

Biden’s comments came at a get-out-the-vote canvassing kick-off here, a day before the Virginia gubernatorial election in which McAuliffe is facing off with GOP candidate Ken Cuccinelli. About 300 people packed into the backyard of a volunteer’s home in this suburb of Washington.

Cuccinelli, Biden continued, is a candidate “whose views on women, you know them well but I think it’s fair to say, are from another era. I mean literally from another era.”

He appeared at the event with McAuliffe, along with Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) and Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), all of whom blasted Cuccinelli over his socially conservative positions on women’s health care and sought to tie him to the tea party.

“Everything they talk about, without exaggeration, is about turning back what the rest of the country and the world thinks is progress,” Biden said. “It’s hard to fathom this state being led by a man who rejects all that this new thinking stands for. The whole nation is looking at this race, that’s not hyperbole.”