So please let them keep it up. I’d rather seen McCain in there than those two idiots.

russ wellen — “Think about it. Have you ever met anybody who referred to themselves as lower-income, never mind working-class?”

is not an affluent society best judged by what it does for the least of its citizens? i have two children and a wife, and earn apx. 40 grand a year. i consider myself “working class.” we get to go out to dinner maybe once a month, rent our home and haven’t had a car less than seven years old in a decade. we have no health insurance. i AM bitter that in the richest and most powerful nation in the world we can green-light obscene parachute packages for disgraced CEO bastards that destroy the retirement packages of people like my father who worked harder in any three year period of his life (with less incentive to do so) than any “MBA president” could ever in a lifetime. nobody in my family has ever recieved a free ride or a handout (other than three months of unemployment pay in the 80′s at a fifth or so of my dad’s regular wages, and the one time we had to ask the church for groceries). of course, psychologically, it is not easy to label yourself as “lower income.” part of being an american is foreseeing, and the ostensible ability to accomplish, better things for your family in the future. that “fake it until you make it” mentality is one of the things that has made america the land of opportunity. it is, however, a mistake to conflate people who are decidedly NOT middle class (economically) and speak otherwise to a nameless faceless survey with people who are not bitter. we ARE. i know that i am. i’m bitter that money that could be spent on ensuring our toys/food/pharmeceuticals/et alia is being spent ensuring that blackwater and halliburton and fluor and monsanto and wal-mart and ADM have a better bottom line. i’m especially bitter that when they don’t and the whole company (a la worldcom, enron, bear stearns) the well-connected fuckwads running the show get no comeuppance, but every hardworking stiff who has worked his/her whole life popping money into a retirement fund that’s invested in them gets screwed. when the children of the truly “elite” in this country are denied a college education and job opportunities and forced by virtue of their lack of any reasonable chance of providing for a family into going to war for the power-mad whim of a line-worker at a pontiac factory in michigan, and when someone who has paid into the health insurance pool for a lifetime but is sentenced to a slow painful death (in the name of profit) for a non-existent “pre-existing condition” or for denial to pay for a proven effective “experimental treatment” i’ll cease to be bitter.

i won’t cease to be lower income, but the truly “elite” in this country have, for my lifetime, not been able to cease being “lower class.”

this american who has seen his family abandoned to corporate interests is bitter INDEED.

sen. obama’s comments were NOT wrong. i, for one, am gratified to know that he understands the bitterness we feel and how we need to take refuge in things that we know will not turn on us (i.e. religion) when we know that government has, since the civil rights act, done nothing but give us promises it refuses to deliver on.

thirty years before the civil rights act our government was hands-off in its approach to business (well, except for union busting, shamefully) and we were sure flying high, weren’t we? we know where that lead: economic meltdown. a strong government that took care of its citizens emerged after the bubble burst and faith in that strong government created the most powerful nation in the history of the planet.

i’m proud to be an american. i’m proud of what this country has stood for. i would like to, someday soon, have reason to be once again.

Your point’s well made. My mom and dad both worked for 40 plus years to raise five kids. Statisticians who label people according to income would have slapped a “lower-middle class” on both.

My mother is among the most intelligent, level-headed people I know. She is proud of her high-school education (and routinely does the NYT crossword in ink in half an hour).

We all know such people. Sen. Obama’s comments were wrong, and labeling people who work for a living is wrong as well.

Wait – say WHAT?

Oh gods, there’s no real hope in this kind of world, is there? Hell, now we know what happened to Edwards…

Bush to McCain:

Check out the macacas on the babe to the right.

Alternative media and progressives have spent the years since the previous two presidential elections heaping abuse on the Democrats for the timid campaigns they ran. Give the public some credit, went the refrain. Hew to the Democrat ideals which saw t…