[A. Pole]

The middle class is not placated by feel-good talk that the stock market has climbed to a record high, or that unemployment is at a record low, or that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is growing. Unemployment statistics don't count the guys who lost $50,000 jobs in manufacturing and are now working $25,000 jobs in retail, and job-growth figures happily do count the wives who have been involuntarily forced into the labor force just to keep groceries on the table.

bump

[roses of sharon]

Well since the middle class voted out their "enemy", and voted in their friends, what is their legislative agenda to bring back all the manufacturing jobs?

I couldn't tell by the article what their plans were.

[JimRed]

...some disappeared in the tsunami of cheap Chinese goods as Wal-Mart replaced small businesses and left behind towns with empty streets and boarded-up windows.

Around here, whenever a small business closes it is almost immediately replaced by another one, usually some kind of yuppie shop.

[Alberta's Child]

Have Republicans realized that jobs were second only to the unpopular war as the issue of 2006 . . .

I challenge Ms. Schlafly to provide evidence to support this point. Everything I've read in the aftermath of the 2006 election indicates that the war in Iraq wasn't even the top issue in the minds of most voters -- and "jobs" (whatever that means) wasn't even among the top five.

[IronJack]

that perennial politician, ... Ted Kennedy

I usually refer to him as a "bloated gutwagon." Or "Souse the Orca." Perennial politician just doesn't capture the full effect of the drunken slob.

[NaughtiusMaximus]

The first wave of Baby Boomers is facing retirement. They will rapidly form the largest "entitlement class" in the history of the country. Politicians who offer to increase the Boomers' benefits from baloney sandwiches to steak and lobster will get elected. Politicians who call for restraint will lose. This will set the pattern for the next twenty years.

Watch, it's coming to a Nanny State near you.

[alloysteel]

Is the middle where we want to be? Dwight Eisenhower was a strict middle-roader in the years 1953 to early 1961, and we saw the politics of compromise and "containment" take the lead. For all the kindly and avuncular face he put to his Presidency, Eisenhower was adamant is not drawing out worldwide Communism into a face-to-face fight, and we were saddled with that curse upon the world for perhaps 30 years longer than we ought to have endured.

Now a similar situation is developing in the confrontation between our values (which, oddly enough, are now partly comprised of some of the few remaining legacies of world socialism) and those of the Islamic world caliphate. Make no mistake, that is not a religion, it is an IDEOLOGY, transcribed from the words of a murderous schizophrenic madman, that would make Charles Manson look like a jovial and highly respected Boy Scout leader.

And we are supposed to compromise with these people? The Reds were reasonable and interested in self-preservation, and THEY were a bear to deal with. How are we supposed to deal with people who show up at meetings with a bomb belted around their waists, with their thumb poised to detonate the device the moment negotiations are not going their way?

[Torie]

If some other nation is making the goods cheaper, protectionism will just delay the inevitable, while hurting the American economy in the meantime. The Soviet Union trade block was the epitome of protectionism. Over time, it produced goods nobody wanted to buy. We tried to protect steel, which just increased the cost to manufacture goods that used steel, hurting American competitiveness.

I won't vote for a protectionist Republican. Granted, a real regime of hard line protectionism would be so economically damaging (and other nations would retaliate, precipitating trade wars), that it would never be implemented. But that doesn't mean we won't have to endure being subjected to demagogic lip servicing of it.

[goldstategop]

People are fed up with watching their good high paying jobs disappear and be outsourced overseas to Asia. While the new jobs they can find pay only half of what their old job did. If the GOP is not going to stand up for middle class Americans, then it is destined to remain a minority party in this country.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." -Manuel II Paleologus