NDOL has actually a pretty good essay on Bush's failure to continue the reduction in poverty, which he promised in 2000, and has, instead, made things much worse for the lower economic class of this nation. Snippet:
| In 2000, George W. Bush ran for president on a platform that claimed the Clinton administration had done too little to help less-fortunate Americans share in the national prosperity of the 1990s. In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, he said that Bill Clinton and Al Gore had "coasted through prosperity," and that he would "extend the promise of prosperity to every forgotten corner of this country."
Of all his broken promises, this was perhaps the cruelest. The prosperity he pledged to spread has vanished, and as always, a poor economy hurts poor people the most. But it gets worse: Bush also promised an aggressive agenda of "compassionate conservatism" to harness civil society to the task of addressing entrenched poverty and other social ills. This agenda has never really materialized, and the president seems to have lost interest in developing it. Instead, the administration has perversely and obsessively focused on improving the after-tax incomes of the wealthiest Americans, shifting the tax burden from those who earn income from inheritance and investment to those who earn income from work. Far from worrying about the plight of those in "every forgotten corner of this country," George W. Bush is deliberately engineering a more unequal society as his top domestic priority. |
Well, yeah. Unless you've kept your head in the sand the past 2-1/2 years, this is not news. What would be news is if the Democratic candidates started mentioning it, because this is the type of simple message with which voters can identify.
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