Let's Look at the Record
Last night, Joe Biden said:
"Look, the people in my neighborhood, they get it. They get it. They know they've been getting the short end of the stick. So walk with me in my neighborhood, go back to my old neighborhood in Claymont, an old steel town or go up to Scranton with me. These people know the middle class has gotten the short end. The wealthy have done very well. Corporate America has been rewarded. It's time we change it. Barack Obama will change it."
Sarah Palin replied:
"Say it ain't so, Joe, there you go again pointing backwards again. You preferenced [prefaced] your whole comment with the Bush administration. Now doggone it, let's look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future."
So, what does she want us to do? Are we expected to ignore the whole eight years of Bush, which by the way still have four months to run? Does she expect us to forget the past and the present and to await our rescue till she and John define their plans for our "future"?
As Al Smith would have said, "Let's take a look at the record."
Over the last eight years, the Republican administration (in which John McCain has played a significant role) has turned a surplus of $250 billion a year into a deficit of $500 billion a year, has sent us into two recessions, cost us 160,000 jobs last month, is leaving us on the verge of a depression, involved in a two-front war which, although we have not lost, we are still far from winning, to stay nothing of an $11 trillion debt.
That's the "record", the legacy, of the Bush-McCain years. But let's give it a human face: for the Americans that Joe Biden is talking about, the reality is even worse. Every day middle class Americans come home and see "For Sale" signs on more and more lawns in their neighborhoods. Every Friday more and more middle class Americans come home after discovering they've been laid off, or had their working hours cut. Every day middle class Americans discover the price of the gas they use in their car, the oil or gas which heats their homes, has gone through the roof. Every day millions of Americans discover that the cost of food, clothes and their children's education are increasing even while their dollars grow less valuable. Sarah, that's not the "past", that's the present.
When my favorite middle class family of five bought gas in the New Jersey suburbs five years ago, it cost $1.60 a gallon. Now it costs $3.50. Heating and air conditioning has gone up from $335 a month to $435 a month. The family spends $500 a week on food; five years ago they spent $360. The cost of their daughter's freshman year at college increased, from the day on which she applied to the day on which she was accepted, by $2500. Their health insurance has gone up from $16,000 a year to $20,000, and to keep the increase that small they've had to raise their deductible to $3500 dollars from $1500 and agree to pay the first $30, up for $10, for every medical visit.
That's the kind of family that Joe Biden's been talking about, and, judging from their expenditures, they're on the upper end of the middle class. The "hockey moms" and "Joe six-packs" that Sarah talks about are doing even worse.
Al Smith was a realist; he knew you judged people by their records not by their promises. Joe Biden knows that too, and he has a record to be proud of. He should have told Sarah that last night, but I'm saying it on his and his running mate's behalf, now.
Last night Sarah said, "Say it ain't so, Joe." But it is so. I say: pray it ain't so, Sarah, because based on what you said last night, if you and your running mate get elected you ain't got a clue to what's happening in America now, and we ain't got a prayer of getting out the mess George Bush, John McCain, and the Republican Party have gotten us into.