As an official member of America’s vast middle class, I welcome President Obama’s pandering.
It’s high time he got back to his “I-love-the-middle-class” thing. After all, every voter is essentially middle class. America’s poor aren’t completely middle-class but they expect to be some day. And America’s rich often prefer the term, upper-middle class, so as not to sound so haughty. And then there’s everyone else in the middle-middle class.
During Obama’s first year in office, nothing much has changed for the middle class.
Foreclosures keep rising, unemployment is stuck at double-digit levels, credit remains tight, too-big-to-fail banks are even bigger and no more regulated, health care is still a disaster, and the economy, despite some nominal growth due to increased government spending, isn’t improving for most Americans. Meanwhile, the federal debt sky rockets and a larger tax burden looms for all of us.
I don’t object to those who want to blame George Bush for this. These problems were at least eight years in the making, and Obama really did inherit them. But Obama was also supposed to start fixing this mess, and the progress has been imperceptible to most of us.
It’s amazing how after Democrats lost a key Senate seat in Massachusetts, Obama is now turning up the “I’m-for-the-middle-class/working-man” rhetoric. Click here for the details in this Associated Press story.
It all sounds great to me. Obama’s State of the Union address on Wednesday will sound great to me, too. He is a great man and a great orator. And I am in the middle class. But where are the jobs?
Obama’s supporters are stilling holding out “hope” for “change.” And guess what happens to the Democrats next November if unemployment is still at 10%?
