When it comes to visions of the middle class, the 2008 presidential campaign is not between Barack Obama and John McCain so much as between Andy Stern and Joe the Plumber. What does that means for our country and its future?<\/p>\n
Andy Stern is head of the Service Employees International Union.\u00a0 By Senator Obama\u2019s standard of earning less than $250,000 a year, he is probably not middle class.\u00a0 Labor leaders at his level typically make much more.\u00a0 But he is a major spokesperson for a view of the American middle class that Senator Obama has embraced and promises to make an organizing principle of his administration.<\/p>\n
This middle class is a sad crowd.<\/p>\n
Its members have suffered years of declining earnings — or had in Senator Obama\u2019s rhetoric until, apparently, someone noticed that they hadn\u2019t, whereupon the rhetoric changed to one of stagnating earnings growth, a questionable but at least defensible proposition.<\/p>\n
About a quarter of them lack health insurance \u2013 although the actual number of the uninsured falls to around six percent of the US population when you eliminate 1) those who are between jobs for only a few months and will have insurance once they get that new job, and 2) those who are in fact poor and eligible for Medicaid but haven\u2019t applied, and 3) illegal aliens.<\/p>\n
And the Stern-Obama middle class is seeing its jobs shipped overseas \u2013 although foreign investment in the US has long created substantially more jobs here than US investment abroad has created in the rest of the world.<\/p>\n
But as Senator Obama describes it, this middle class is basically a dead-end gang.\u00a0 Its members are life\u2019s passive players. They will never be any more prosperous than they are today and will probably soon be much less so.<\/p>\n
This middle class needs Mr. Stern\u2019s union and others like it to protect them \u2013 even if they keep rejecting unions in organizing elections.\u00a0 So Senator Obama has embraced card check, legislation effectively to eliminate the secret ballot in determining the unionization of America\u2019s workplaces.<\/p>\n
It also needs the kind of employer-mandated health coverage Senator Obama advocates.\u00a0 The government will charge a fine (or fee, or tax, whatever you call it) of employers who opt out of providing coverage and use the money to fund insurance for the company\u2019s workers. Presumably this fee will be subsidized, if not immediately, then after Congress got through playing with it. Soon, and particularly in states where insurance is expensive (that is, states that have loaded mandates on policies sold in the state), the government-sponsored insurance policies will push out those that aren\u2019t sold through the government.\u00a0 In other words, Senator Obama has put forward a two-step plan leading to single-payer health coverage.\u00a0 This is surely why single-payer-advocate Stern hasn\u2019t objected to it.<\/p>\n
The members of the Stern-Obama middle class don\u2019t own stock.\u00a0 They do not intend to start or participate in the starting of businesses \u2013 and will not move up where they work today.\u00a0 This stagnation applies to their children as well. So of course Senator Obama\u2019s call for letting the Bush tax cuts expire and piling additional taxes on $250,000-a-year earners will be OK by them.<\/p>\n
In other words, Senator Obama\u2019s middle class \u2013 borrowed from Mr. Stern — lives without hope, except the hope that Mr. Obama himself brings to them.<\/p>\n
Senator McCain\u2019s middle class is very different.<\/p>\n
Like Joe the Plumber, many are employed in small businesses — or aspire to buy a business or start one of their own someday.\u00a0 In other words, one way or another they are working to move up in life. So, like Joe the Plumber, they are concerned about letting the 2003 tax cuts expire and about loading even more taxes on incomes they hope soon to have.<\/p>\n
Active players in their own lives, they will switch jobs a number of times during their careers. So McCain\u2019s proposal to allow them to own health insurance policies that they can carry wherever they go fits their needs \u2013 just as the Obama plan does not.<\/p>\n
A remarkable number of small businesses sell and buy overseas \u2013 as do most larger companies — so Senator Obama\u2019s embrace of protectionism is a threat to Senator McCain\u2019s middle class, not an offer of help.<\/p>\n
The point is that like Joe the Plumber these are people who make their own hope.\u00a0 Such people have characterized all the employment growth in the US economy for at least three decades.\u00a0 Today owners and employees of small businesses \u2013 or larger companies that were recently small — comprise by far the bulk of the US workforce.<\/p>\n
Despite Senator McCain\u2019s repeated resistance to Bush administration as well as Congressional run ups in spending these past eight years, Senator Obama will again charge this week (per Sunday night reports) that Senator McCain has never defined a single area in which he would act differently on the economy than has the President.<\/p>\n
But setting aside the disingenuous rhetoric, here is this year\u2019s real choice regarding the character of our economic future.\u00a0 On one side is Senator Obama\u2019s passive and hopeless middle class, on the other Senator McCain\u2019s active and aspiring one.\u00a0 Andy Stern v. Joe the Plumber: in a week and a day, we\u2019ll see which vision the nation embraces.<\/p>\n
Clark S. Judge is managing director of the White House Writers Group, Inc., a Washington-based policy and communications consulting firm.\u00a0 He was a special assistant and speechwriter to President Reagan.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When it comes to visions of the middle class, the 2008 presidential campaign is not between Barack Obama and John McCain so much as between Andy Stern and Joe the Plumber. What does that means for our country and its future? Andy Stern is head of the Service Employees International Union.\u00a0 By Senator Obama\u2019s standard […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[12],"class_list":["post-114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-commentary-campaign-2008","tag-hugh-hewitt"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":468,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114\/revisions\/468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}