WASHINGTON POST COLUMN: …. [North Carolina Senator John] Edwards famously preached that the nation had become divided along class lines. As he said in his speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention: “We still live in a country where there are two different Americas. One for all of those people who have lived the American dream and don’t have to worry, and another for most Americans, everybody else who struggles to make ends meet every single day. It doesn’t have to be that way.” When he ran again in 2008, he doubled down on that message.
At the time, Republicans mocked him. “Angry talk and class-warfare rhetoric and economic isolationism won’t get anybody hired,” President George W. Bush said in 2004. Now almost every major GOP presidential candidate describes the economy in bifurcated terms. Sens. Rand Paul (Ky.) and Ted Cruz (Tex.) quote “two Americas” explicitly in their stump speeches.
Democrats haven’t just paid homage to Edwards’s rhetoric. They have also adopted his platform. In 2008, Edwards ran on cutting carbon emissions aggressively to fight global warming and raising the minimum wage to what, in today’s dollars, would be about $10.50 per hour. Now Democratic presidential candidates call for even more aggressive climate policies, and President Obama, who beat Edwards in the primaries, wants a $10.10 minimum wage; Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), running for the Democratic nomination, promotes a $15 minimum… (more)
EDITOR: We will believe that the GOP has had a change of heart when it calls for higher taxes on the top 1/10th of 1%, ridding the tax code of loop holes for the super rich, and higher minimum wages.
