February 20, 2004 - It’s the economy, Stupid. It isn’t the stock market with its rarified air breathed by speculators, traders and corporate raiders. It’s the job market and the super market and the gas pump at the convenience store. It’s whether or not there’s some of the week left at the end of the paycheck. It’s a make do and hand-me-down and did the unemployment check come on time life for millions of us. It’s a close the plant and stand in line for the jobs that disappeared.

The jobs are still there, they have just moved offshore. It’s a Wal-Mart full of Chinese goods and food stamps in the grocery line. That is what people live with day to day. That is what the coming election is about.

Poor George is clueless because he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth – or nose if you believe the rumors – and he just doesn’t know how people live when they fall below the median income line. To George everybody has money in the bank and shares in the market. He just can’t comprehend a life that is spent in a Friday to Friday spiral. It is beyond his experience and beyond his ability to imagine. He has lived his life without having to deal with consequences. His life has been different and he can’t conceive of life in any other way.

It is beyond John Kerry’s experience too. But like an earlier Boston son of privilege, he seems to be able to look at the chintz curtained windows below Beacon Hill and feel what it is to live within those walls. Perhaps you just see life through different eyes when you have driven a small boat under fire, responsible for the lives of all aboard her and with nothing to protect you except your skin and your wits. Perhaps if you have shared that experience you see into the lives of other people even better than you see your own.

It is not beyond John Edward’s experience. He lived that life and made it up on the strength of talent, wits and not a little luck. He started life behind those curtains made of chintz. He watched his parents as they eked a paycheck to last to the next one. He did not listen when they told him he couldn’t go to college or make it through law school or win an election to the US Senate as a North Carolina Democrat. Looking back he has not forgotten where he came from.

When John Kerry or John Edwards talk about doing something to find and create good jobs for the Americans who need them you know that they are not talking about tax cuts for their friends. When they talk about rebuilding America’s industrial heart you know that they are not talking about creating a better climate for exporting the American economy to benefit the corporate bottom line.

It is the economy, Stupid – the economy of the check-out line and the gas pump not the stock ticker running across the bottom of the screen; the economy of the unemployment check and not the dividend check. It is the economy of pot-holed highways and crumbling school buildings. And, yes, it is the economy of too many young and not-so-young Americans uprooted from their lives to fight a war halfway around the world on money borrowed from our grandchildren. It is an economy that is neither conservative nor compassionate. America can do better than that because we are a better people than that.

We can put America back to work. We can bring America back home and we can rebuild America while we are reconstructing Iraq. It will take work and it will take sacrifice – and an administration that asks as much from Wall Street as it asks from Main Street. It will take an administration dedicated to showing our grandchildren the far horizons of opportunity instead of burying them under a mountain of debt.