Discrimination against the poor by the Dems - how acceptable to you?

[robbedvoter]

While I wasn't looking the Democratic party dec;ared itself "the middle class party. I suppose this would be like an income Goldilocks litmus test: we represent people who don't have too much or too little - but juuuust right.
I used to consider the "lomousine liberals" and "liberal elite" total BS, but now I realize that there is a grain of truth in it: if you don't reach a certain tax bracket, you ain't in our club.
GOP may work for the richest at the expense of everyone else and may discriminate against anything in sight, but they are clever enough to not exclude the poor from their target demographic. Very clever indeed, as they intend to increase this demographic with their policies.
Think of it: if you are unemployed, or too poor to pay taxes, DNC is not paying any attention to you (most of their economic incentives are in the form of tax credits). But the GOP which chennels your tax money in faith based crap, will reach these people in the soup line and bamboozle them.
When Wes Clark proposed a tax program that eliminated taxes for families up to 50,000, Kerry said: "but how are they going to share their part of the burden?" "By sending their sons and daughters in wars" Clark answered Faux bimbo who, interestingly enough asked the same question. Kerry promissed with a straight face that in 3 years the minimum wage will go up all the way to...$7...Oh, glory!
I am not asking for acceptance in the middle class party - I left voluntarily as soon as I saw the income litmus test.
But as an outsider , I have a bit of advice: you may want to rethink your platform/base - because by the time BFEE is done with this country, there won't be any Goldilocks economic base left for ya. That's the one area in which I suspect they'll be competent enough to accomplish their goal.

[ElsewheresDaughter]

1. most middle class are only 3 paychecks away from homelessness

so if the dems say they are for the "middle class" they surely are for the poor...always has been and always will be!

[robbedvoter]

2. But the people 3 paychecks behind them will either stay away

from politics or hail the fearless leader as the good reverend told them.
The very notion of "middle class" is a "i am better than you" idea.
So, you say it's OK to represent people 3 paychecks away from poverty. I say, your base is shrinking even as i write this.

[ElsewheresDaughter]

46. America is (thanks to bushco*) becoming a caske society like India

and bush will not rest until our streets resemble Calcutta

[Philostopher]

3. To an extent, I agree with you.

My suspicion is that a large portion of the 40% of people who no longer vote are those who don't think either party is serious about helping them and don't care because they think both parties are too corporate-tied (and again, to an extent I agree with that). It's clear, and has been for four years, that Bush and his cronies want nothing more than for everybody who's not immensely well-off to be poor. That means no matter what we do for a living, we'll have no choice but do it for $8 an hour just to have any work at all.

I think the fact that individual donations pushed Kerry and the DNC beyond the GOP this year should tell somebody over in that boys' club somthing -- that flirting with Time Warner and the military industrial complex isn't the only way to get things done. For some reason, even Democratic politicians seem to live in a bubble, where the GOP's accusations of 'class warfare' actually mean something to them. Screw that, most of us who know anything know the real class warfare is being undertaken by the GOP -- I don't think, once they added Edwards to the ticket, they let him talk about the 'two Americas' thing more than a dozen times in public (if they did, nobody covered it, but I saw them and Edwards didn't talk for five minutes).

He had the right idea, and that theme should have been an important part of the Democratic message this time around, and always should be. Fixing it on the ground by educating people well, providing programs to bring the lowest up to the waterline, helping those on the edge instead of imprisoning them ... sadly, those are programs that require a lot of effort and moderate cost, and for some reason, the Democratic Party seems uneasy asking those of us left in the middle class to help support those who may never make it there but who could live much better lives. If we're calling ourselves Dems, we shouldn't be hesitant to do this -- I don't know why, other than 'corporate effect,' they're not pressing this issue more. I think they'd probably draw in a lot of enthusiasm from people who think nobody cares.

We had several posters here, before the election, who warned us of this -- that the party was sounding way, way too much like the party of the guilt-ridden middle-class taxpayer, and too little like the party that cares about everybody. While I'm not sure it was the make-or-break contingency this time around, I'm sure it hurt us.

[robbedvoter]

4. A rich man talking pretty is not going to help much

I was talking about actual attitudes - even here on DU. In Europe, "middle class" is synonym to wishy-washy - the name for it is "bourgeois"
It's a state of mind that dominated these elections, no matter how manny Americas were on the bloviating speech of the day.
Health care, children assistance - tax credits. You don't pay taxes - you are automatically left out of it all.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

6. Tax cuts don't appeal to them either.

Since, as you say, they don't pay them. So how, exactly, do Republicans appeal to them better than us economically speaking? They don't talk about providing programs, services, or aid. They talk about cutting welfare, cutting Medicare, and privatizing social security (which has no positive impact at all on the lowest class).

[robbedvoter]

35. Republicans are lying of course - appealing to base sentiments

(hate the Arabs, the gays, the non-born again). They can do it because they have the media and the faith based crap that your taxes subsidize. Those people end up voting against their interest of course. But, who ever asked them to be REPRESENTED (not helped, represented)- on a higher ground? Not the Democrats, for sure.

[BurgherHoldtheLies]

8. On behalf of the bourgeois middle class....

Let me say that living a bourgeois existence in your day to day life does not mean that you abandon logical thinking. I believe that those of us who have ended up with pretty textbook definitions of bourgeois lives are still drawn to the compelling messages of a greater good. We are willing to pay taxes for a greater good, such as healthcare or afterschool programs, but don't want to be taxed to fund pork programs on either side of the political spectrum. This admin. is the most fiscally irresponsible group in my lifetime and their programs include funding for NASCAR and golf courses...unbelievable. Not to mention the bill for Iraq.

[robbedvoter]

30. I don't mind having you in a party that represents me

What I object to is the refusal to acknowledge my existence - at least other than 'something to be helped"

[gulogulo]

60. Let me ask you something:

You write:

"We are willing to pay taxes for a greater good, such as healthcare or afterschool programs, but don't want to be taxed to fund pork programs on either side of the political spectrum."

Wouldn't it follow then that, since there is no way to assure that your taxes will go toward the programs where you want them to go, it would be better for taxes to be as low as possible so you could fund the programs that you want to fund with the money that you would save because of lower tax burden?

Of course, neither one of the two major parties subscribes to the ideology that would allow that to happen.

[Philostopher]

10. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you,

I'm just talking from logistics because, sadly, logistics are where the rubber hits the road, not actual personal commitment. I don't think the problem is that Dems don't care -- I think it's an articulation problem. I hope it is, anyway.

One problem is that even when Dems have good ideas, when the GOP controls the senate and congress, those ideas inevitably get perverted into some economic Darwinist wet dream. What Clinton wanted as far as 'welfare reform' and what actually was enacted were very different things, for instance. Once Clinton uttered those words, Gingrich took off with the ball and 'welfare reform' became 'kick the poor.' I don't have any illusions about Bill Clinton, he disappointed me in many ways, but it wasn't all because he didn't care or didn't try, and that goes for many Dems holding office right now.

Instead of offering policies and programs that would benefit everybody on the lower end of the economic spectrum, not just those making $50K a year or more, Dems have allowed themselves to be pushed out onto a ledge where they're fighting for small blocs of white, homeowning voters. That's their own damned fault, and it disgusts me, too. It's not where they perform best, and it ignores the 40% of people who don't bother to vote because they think nobody cares what happens to them. I'm disgusted that such a large number of people think nobody cares, and disgusted that anything offered to help them gets mangled on its way through the machine to the point it still isn't sufficient.

I don't know -- everything gets pushed to the right for myriad reasons, some of them that corporations determine what news we get, some of them that corporations fund campaigns, some of them that people are uninformed and can be easily led. That Democrats have abandoned the populist message is part of the problem, I just don't know if it's so much that they no longer care or that Republicans have gained control of the tiller and narrowed the dialogue.

[BurgherHoldtheLies]

11. Maybe an insight....

I have to say that there was a message that came across loud and clear to the bourgeois and maybe we were just suckers when we were coming of age in the 80's: There were frequent stories in the media about 'generations within families receiving welfare' and the lack of incentives to change the dynamics. I understood that nobody gets rich on welfare but to have g-parents, parents and then their adult children all on welfare with no future to ever leave the public assistance cycle is not a good system. I support anything that helps people improve their lives, like after-school programs, educational training and healthcare but I have trouble with programs that just give money to mentally/physically able-bodied people without any incentives for improvement. Maybe you think it's a harsh stand and want to flame me, but I'm just trying to give some insight into my corner of the world.

[Philostopher]

26. The money they're given isn't the problem.

The problems are deeper, and more difficult to tackle -- many poor people are trapped, quite literally, by the way our whole economy functions. It doesn't matter how able your body is if your elementary school didn't encourage you to learn and you drop out as soon as you hit sixteen because you can't learn or nobody cares to encourage you. I grew up in a small, rural, 95% white town, so trying to assess blame by laying it on the culture is a straw man (not saying you're trying to do that, but many Republicans -- and even many Dems -- do). Access to birth control and sex education, prenatal care, affordable child care, and jobs that can actually feed a family would be a good start, but you see, those are complex programs and moderately costly. On the whole, our economic system works on the backs of the non-working and working poor. The pilot program in Wisconsin proved that ultimately, it's cheaper to help those who are really motivated and just pay off the rest. Some people just cannot get out of the hole -- they have physical or psychological problems for which they can't afford to compensate, they have learning disabilities that are complicated to get around. Sadly, as the original poster noted, those people have been not only redlined as far as where they can live -- they don't even enter into the dialogue anymore.

I'd be all for doing away with the welfare system if everybody had health insurance, everybody had some kind of fair pension plan, and everybody who wanted a job could be guaranteed one in a system that would provide sufficient economic stability for them to live without having to work two jobs without health insurance and leave five year old kids alone at home to fend for themselves, and nobody was a broken arm away from total poverty ... but that climate does not exist today in this country. The way things are going, it never will exist here, because seven dollar an hour jobs are still jobs, so when you have people working two or three of them just to keep their heads above water, the powers that be can claim those people are employed.

The situation is incredibly complex, of course, and to fix it would be difficult and expensive. It's easier to just shrug and say, 'oh, well, I guess it's their culture, I guess they don't want to improve themselves because we're feeding them for nothing,' than it is to figure out what it would take to fix that, and bite the bullet and ask the very rich to pay for the privilege of working within a system that's made them very rich. Even the Dems have shied away, in recent years, from saying that -- many people who are very rich became that way because of the economic system we have in the U.S. that doesn't tax them at a rate commensurate with their holdings. The more you have, the more you can afford to get out of paying.

Again, I'm not saying that you in particular -- or even all Republicans -- hold this attitude, but many do. Many Dems do, as well -- it's so easy to blame the victim, especially when it's difficult and expensive to change the system. I won't flame anybody for having incorporated the attitude that's been flung at us for the past twenty years. I know better, but not everybody does, and that's not necessarily their fault -- finding the information to tell you how screwed up the system really is for some people requires effort, and not everybody's motivated to make it, but I won't blame them for being lazy because it's really not all that easy to find the information that quantifies all the reasons some people never get off welfare.

There probably is a certain subset of people in this country who would sit back and take a check for doing nothing and never think about getting work, but to insinuate that any majority of people who draw public assistance want to be in that situation, or have any idea how to get out of it, would be far too simplistic for reality. Many of them would help themselves and 'climb the ladder' if our economic system hadn't sawed off the first three or four rungs, then forced a lot of people from the middle of the ladder backward.

[BurgherHoldtheLies]

28. Well stated argument. Appreciate your thoughts. n/t

[robbedvoter]

36. Thanks for being honest. Familiar with the bootstraps theory.

Thing is, you frame the issue in GOP think tank terms. I wasn't talking about "hand-outs". I was talking about representation - POLITICAL REPRESENTATION. You obviously cannot represent me as you think I want you to "give me stuff"

[The Flaming Red Head]

51. Have you ever been hungry?

It's one thing to talk about programs and unending cycles of poverty in a test book manner it's another to actually have to live like that. Most people on food stamps and even on welfare or government assistance have jobs, McJobs.

What you’re saying about the poverty reminds me of a book I read written by a social worker who said same things you said about poverty being passed down from generation to generation, but it was written around 1919 by a social worker named Devine who was describing the lives of the immigrants in NYC.

[American Tragedy]

22. Bourgeois is such a pompous term

As someone on the upper end of the socioeconomic strata, I hate it when I hear people disdain the middle class, especially supposed liberals.

I guess they think that people of moderate income are just not poor enough to be fashionably proletariat, but not wealthy enough to be glamourous and powerful.

[robbedvoter]

37. Maybe so. I used it to defend against a very arrogant attitude.

The fact remains - that this economic Goldilocks has no social identity - and it's probably why voters ebd up not giving a damn about another stolen election. There's some flesh and bone missing here.
Like making a party of Security moms/NASCAR dads/consummers of Zimma.
The one clear identifying feature - as coming clearly from many posts: you are the guys who think themselves as ...well, better than the poor.

[American Tragedy]

49. I've never believed that. In fact, I know as well as anyone that wealth

is very often merely a matter of good fortune. It does not signify that an individual is somehow superior morally or even professionally. Capitalism is an imperfect economic system that does not always adequately reinforce hard work, particularly that of the public sector. Our entire society would fall apart without police officers, fire fighters, teachers, soldiers, and others, yet these occupations are paid comparatively little. I do appreciate this, which is part of why I and my family are Democrats.

I am not particularly proud of my circumstances, I only mention them to make it clear where I am coming from. When I hear the term bourgeois, or nouveau riche for that matter, it is used snobbishly by other rich people in order to feel better about themselves.

In general, I hate prejudice based on individual wealth or poverty.

Incidentally, that quote from Wes about how the poor pay their dues to society is brilliant, thank you for posting it. He was my guy in the primaries too.

[KnowerOfLogic]

54. I kinda like it, and what are you saying - the upper class are the

ones who are 'really' discriminated against and disrespected?

[American Tragedy]

57. No that wasn't what I was saying at all, though it is sometimes true

Kids at school definitely judged and rejected me when I was growing up when they saw the cars my mom drove. It was embarrassing; up to that point I hadn't really recognized that my circumstances were so different. I thought I was pretty much like everyone else. I tried to say that my mom was just borrowing the cars, but in the end I was labelled as a 'rich kid'.

I've come to terms with it now, and I've decided to be honest about it so that people understand the context of my comments here. It would be disingenuous to pretend to be a working class heroine. Still, I resent prejudice based on individual wealth or poverty.

But anyway, my post refers to the word bourgeois. When I hear the term bourgeois, it is used contemptuously by the upper class to degrade the middle class and the nouveau riche. In general, it is used with an air of cultural superiority. What's to like about that?

[janx]

43. I think you might be mistaken about the definition of "bourgeois."

It originally meant anyone who wasn't a peasant or a rich person, but it later morphed into a word that signified the upper middle class, the mercantile class. The bourgeoisie were often ridiculed as people who liked to appear rich--you know, those people who flaunt money and possessions and who are made fun of because of that.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

5. Newsflash for you

1) How do you make poor people rich people? Education, health care, welfare, and affordable housing. Gee, Democrats don't fight for those things... Oh... wait a minute, we do. Sorry.

2) Poor people usually don't like being pissed on and looked down upon as "poor people". The only way Republicans get to poor people is that they play off their basest of instincts: an image of a powerful and bloodthirsty America and a fear of God. We're focused on actually helping them, not just duping them into voting for us.

3) That minimum wage increase IS a big deal. It's a VERY big deal. And if you think a higher minimum wage increase would be effective, you obviously don't understand economics.

[robbedvoter]

7. No, I don't understand economics. I guess Murkans is smartest

all other civilized countries in the world HAVE bigger minimum wages, but we have our fearless leader. And, yeah, people don't like being called poor - so we only talk tho those thinking they are "better than poor"
You represent the exact attitude that makes people who are OK with being called what they are stay away from this party (which, I mistakenly thought was "the party of the people"). Thanks for reminding me the source of the disgust.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

9. You're welcome on the reminder.

Those countries might HAVE higher minimum wages, but they didn't get to that point overnight. You have to get there gradually or you bankrupt your economy. Small and large businesses alike will not be able to compensate for the large fluctuation in payroll and will simultaneously raise prices on their products and cut jobs. Then we'll have less people working and the minimum wage for someone without a job is $0/hour. Oh, and because of the vast inflation you've caused, that huge wage increase will mean exactly nothing because the cost of living will skyrocket. Minimum wage increases have to be incremental and small enough in order for the economy to suppress it and not increase the cost of living and the cost of doing business, and thus, not being harmful.

Hey, if YOU can't understand the truth of the situation and YOU want to be disgusted, be my guest. I'll be living here in reality, where it's not feasible to do what you want.

[KnowerOfLogic]

14. In a word - bullshit. Corporate income up -> real wages down.

You do the math. Corporate income continues to rise to ever more obscene leves all the time (and i'm not just talking about Fortune 500 companies); Businesses raise their prices, add new fees, downsize and down-quality their products w/o lowering the price, etc. CONTINUALLY, and yet they never raise their starting pay unless it is mandated by law. When do workers get to raise their pay just because they feel like it?

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

16. So naive.

You really think they're going to dip into their profits? That's laughable. No, they'll raise prices first, then cut labor. The only way you'd REALLY get them to cut into profits is by forcing wages to be tied to revenue directly. And that ain't gonna happen. EVER.

[robbedvoter]

39. So, we need to make nice and accomodate them as they are....

well the very economy that you understand so well, but I fail to.
(Hint: a government who actually wants some economic fairness can use legislative power here. Happened to a degree during Clinton - lots were better off - even the "economy" people)

[KnowerOfLogic]

15. You obviously don't understand that businesses are going to raise

their prices *anyway,* no matter what the wage they're paying is, so if they have to raise their prices to cover a wage increase, well, at least the workers got a wage increase! Otherwise, prices will go up, workers will get NO wage increase, and hence the buying power of their salary actually goes down, which is what has been happening for many years. Minimum wage should be *at least* $8/hr now, just to be keeping up with inflation.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

17. As if price increases are static.

Because they aren't capable of raising prices at a higher level than they currently do, right?

[KnowerOfLogic]

55. Well, like i said, they're gonna raise the prices anyway, so given

the choice of a price increase with a wage increase or a price increase w/o a wage increase, i'll take the former. As someone who has been working around the minimum wage through two federally mandated minimum wage increases, there is no way in heck that you are going to convince me that these wage increases are in fact a net negative for workers like me. The raising of prices will go on just as surely as the sun is going to rise; the raising of wages will *only* occur due to legal mandate or extremely short supply of labor.

[robbedvoter]

21. Your answer sounds like those DNC envelope stuffers that make me

sleepy and nauseous at the same time. (the sad thing, that used to happen at the peak of my enthusiasm for the party). They seemed clueless and demagogical to me, but now that you answered the same way to ME - I got the reason: ARROGANCE.
You assume that because you may have more money than me "understan these things better" - so it's OK to patronize me.
You also think that, because you think poverty is some mark of personal failure, therefore shamevful, it's OK in civilized society to avoid speaking about him, and pretending you respect poor people by calling them "middle class' (5 checks away from homelessness as they may be).
What you miss, in talking down to us, is that those of us who aren't stupid or ashamed have now absolutely no reason to support the likes of you.
I don't need to be called anything I am not, and at my age, state of health you can do zip for me with your wonderful programs. I was for you because I thought you believed in civil rights and democracy - that proved a joke since November 2nd too.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

25. Who's arrogant here?

I make $27k per year. So who's the arrogant jackass here? Lemme tell you, it isn't me.

[robbedvoter]

33. As expected, you define yourself by your bracket. Didn't ask/care

myself how much you make. You OTOH had the audacity to tell me that to want a higher minimum wage proves i don't understand anything about economy. That's arrogant (among other things)

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

38. It's not arrogant to tell you that. It's correct.

I mean, we're talking simple economics here. You don't need to break out your graphing calculator to figure out that greedy execs are going to protect their profit margin at all costs and jacking up the minimum wage overnight isn't going to do anything other than move them into a full-fledged defensive position. You're arguing the way things should be versus the way they really are. That's why I call you naive.

And while you didn't ask how much I make, you most certainly implied I was one of your so called "Limousine Liberals" with your pithy comments. Just because I corrected your asinine comments, that does not mean I define myself by my tax bracket.

However, you have, through your comments, defined yourself as ignorant and pompous. So have fun on ignore.

[Michael_UK]

12. The American Middle class and the British Middle Class

As a brit, what I've noticed is the change in language - what we in the UK call middle class is way above what you guys seems to call middle class.

If a UK politican talked about "helping the middle classes", although they evidently do target the better off voters, it starts to sound elitist.

As I see it, if you're three pay cheques away from homelessness, you ain't middle class

[AP]

19. Chomsky says "middle class" is a term invented to confuse people about...

...where their class loyalties should be.

Either you have to work for a living or you don't. The notion of a "middle" suggests that there's a class of people who don't rely on a society that protects the value of an hour of labor.

If you're a doctor or a lawyer or the dustman, to keep going you need a society that doesn't shift wealth from people who work for it to people who live of capital gains and dividend checks and who get rich off financial tricks.

[BurgherHoldtheLies]

20. Bill Gates goes to work...he's not in my social circle. n/t

[AP]

29. Bill Gates makes all his money from selling stock taxed at 15%.

And any salary he gets is deterimined at his discretion due to the fact that he's the CEO of the company.

Your class loyalties shouldn't be with him.

[Orangepeel]

24. almost everyone in America thinks they are middle class

no matter whether they are rich or poor

[robbedvoter]

34. You should get out more. There are plenty of Americans who don't

see themselves as middle class. Some of them were taught to hate Democrats for being elitists - and you can see now why they are buying it. Others, stay home - as they reject both fascism and "middle class" BS. They all make up almost 1/2 of the voting age population.
Interestingly enough, it was Michael Moore who managed to reach to lots of them. I find the party's indignation with him quite telling - and proving my point. After all, DNC knows membership is for fundraising. So, who needs the poor?

[Logansquare]

47. When one lives in a country where poverty is blamed on personal failure

you tend to want to identify with the mythical "middle class." The myth of Individualism may have built America, but now it sure as hell is tearing it apart. Wealthy people honesty believe they've "earned" dividends and inheritance, and poor people believe that they can't catch a break because something is wrong with them.

[KnowerOfLogic]

13. True; dems should realy do more for the poor, and there are a lot

of them (us).

[AP]

18. Bill Clinton refused to drop the EITC in order to drop gas tax increase in

his first budget bill (the gas tax was supposed to pay for the EITC).

The middle class would have been hurt the most by the gas tax, but the EITC helped poor people.

There was no lobby of poor people arguing for the EITC even though moderate Dems and all Republicans were opposed to the gas tax.

Clinton and the rest of the Dems did it anyway.

Dems do stick up for the poor in order to help build a huge middle class (which is what happened under Clinton). Just because they're focussed on creating a large middle class doesn't mean they're ignoring the poor.

[robbedvoter]

23. This thread was not about policies - some of which were indeed good.

Dems won't be making policies for some time now (as they allowed 3 elections to be stolen from them). So, I was trying to make the point about platform, base , agenda. helping the poor is nice - BFEE claims to be doing so with the "points of light" crap. REPRESENTING the poor is a more inportant thing - and I wish there was a political party to do it.

[sandnsea]

27. Everybody thinks their middle class

That's first. Second, the working poor who recognize they aren't middle class, don't like to have it pointed out and many think there's too many programs causing too much taxes that hurt their ability to earn a decent living in the first place.

Equitable Economic Policy. We have to totally change the way we talk about economy and community, rich vs. poor is just not going to get it done.

[robbedvoter]

31. But rich vs poor is what we got - and more and more will realize it

W is driving the economy into the ground while removing the safety net FDR put in place. I do not need programs. I need representation. Respect? Would that be too much to ask? I'll say it again: not everyone thinks poverty as personal failure. Some of the poor aren't working - having retired, so your qualifier is yet another way to put people in boxes and humiliate them. Dickens used the term "the deserving poor" - it's what you were looking for I guess.
I didn't intend to moralize anyone - just wanted to point out the pragmatism of recognizing your declared base is going bye-bye.
But I find some of the attitudes here more offensive than I expected.

[Daybreaker]

32. I agree in part.

The Democrats definitely do need to pay more attention to those near and below the poverty line. All of America does.

I still think they do a better job of this than Republicans do. Republicans pander to the poor in speeches and then exploit them in policy. Democrats do the same pandering, and then rather than exploit the poor, simply ignore them. The Democrat platform ends up being better for the poor in an indirect way, by being pro-environment and pro-labor (I don't know how Republicans steal that one).

It could definitely be better. But the solution, I think, has more to do with getting rid of the bribery process in politics. I don't know how you'd do that, though.

[robbedvoter]

41. Republicans lie, Democrats patronize. They should be the natural

political representation for all people (I thought that was the case). But, somehow, the mere subject brigs up GOP stuff like "bootsraps", handouts, and nicer ones like "helping" - the "working poor" etc.
As think tanks are being born on the left - here's an assignment: how to fight against the "limousine liberals" meme? By stopping looking down on the "non-middle class' people (yes, Virginia, they do exist, and a few of them even know it)

[janx]

40. Do you have a link or a quote or something?

I know that the Democratic party cares about the middle class because the middle class drives our economy, and the only references I've heard on the part of the Dems have to do with that. I've never heard anything from any Dem, let alone any Dem leader, who claims that the Dem party IS the middle class or should be the middle class

I guess I'm a bit confused. Some context would help. :hi:

[robbedvoter]

42. It was the major theme in all campaign speeches _ Kerry et al

"The party of the middle class"
In fact, I found a quote from Kerry
More vacations than people on welfare
http://www.commondreams.org/views/022300-103.htm
Senator John Kerry once joked on Imus about former governor William Weld, ''this guy takes more vacations than the people on welfare.''

but I wasn't going to turn this in some personal attack. Some here probably do not see any problem with the joke - and it's not really so much the point that it was Kerry's. The point is: the DNC thinks they won - because they outraised the RNC. It doesn't seem they'll move to expand their base any time soon - but W is working hard shrinking it. The "middle class" will be dinosaurs. Adjust or perish.

[janx]

44. I don't think that just because the Dem party got more money

than the Republican party (if that is the case) they are discriminating against the poor. The middle class is shrinking, that's true, but I must be missing your point.

[robbedvoter]

48. No, that's not what I meant. The platform is crafted for the middle class

The lack of vision exibited by the DNC (fundraising beung their ultimate goal it appears), seems to indicate that they won't open their base to the less donation-worthy - thereby making themselves irrelevant.

[American Tragedy]

50. He really said that???

I thought that was fabricated. God, how sad. How embarrassing.

[Zhade]

45. Completely unacceptable.

NT!

[UpsideDownFlag]

52. about as acceptable as discrimination against the south. nt

[robbedvoter]

53. Excellent analogy .

[Radical Activist]

56. We purged the poor from our party a long time ago.

With all the talk of purging on these boards, this is when it was really done. When Democratic strategists decided to ignore the poor because they don't vote or make campaign contributions. Yes, this was done by the limousine liberals who pass by poor neighborhoods on the expressway while they go to work downtown and by the DLC.

When people talk about how few people vote, this is why. Neither party is speaking to the majority of Americans. I bet people would vote of there was a real worker's party that addressed their concerns in a more fundamental way than the moderate Democratic proposals.

[Tinoire]

58. Very good post RV

I've already pledged not to vote for a candidate who doesn't think the "poor" of this country merit any real attention. If we don't find a way to become the party of the people again, we are doomed.

Unfair taxation without proper representation, guaranteed health-care, affordable (if not free) education- all of these things need to be addressed. Oh yeah, and also the very important point of not sending poor kids off to die to ensure the Third/Second World subsidization of rich people's way of life.

You bring me a candidate who supports those things and I will work my fingers to the bones for him. But, important caveat, he can't be connected to the any neo-Liberal organizations which have the same world domination goals as the neo-Conservatives; there's enough misery in the world to last our lifetimes thanks to the imperialistic meddling of the First World nations.

[AP]

61. I second that emotion.

That's exactly my set of priorities.

[w4rma]

59. You forget that Democrats talk about EXPANDING the middle class and

bringing MORE people into it. You don't want a country of poor people. You want to bring people OUT of the lower class INTO the middle class.