Posted by
Katherine Harms on Thursday, September 04, 2008 2:52:13 PM
After the applause died down in
Minneapolis, the press and the Obama campaign picked their jaws up off the floor, and the first words out of their mouths were “middle class.” They complained that this phrase did not occur even once in Sarah Palin's speech.
They were right. Sarah Palin spoke to the Republican convention and millions viewing by television for more than twenty minutes and she never used the words “middle class.” In fact, she did not mention any class whatsoever. You would think that she believes we are all equal. If you listen to Sarah Palin speak, you will conclude quickly that she does not know what the “classes” of our society are. If Rick Warren asks her who is rich, she might not know the definition of that class.
The media and the Obama campaign are baffled by the absence of these words. Obama promises a “middle class” tax cut. He promises to help the “middle class” and the “poorest in our society” because he has definitions. I don’t know where they are written down, but I know that somewhere in a Democrat repository of secret documents there is a set of definitions of class that is as rigid as a Hindu caste system. In Obama’s world, class is critical to success. Without a variety of classes to battle for government largesse, Obama’s political agenda falls apart.
I have been baffled by the constant Democrat references to class. When I was growing up I vividly remember our teachers telling us that America was the country where there were no classes. Everybody was born equal. Everybody could accomplish anything he had the courage to work for. My friends and I were told day after day that we could do anything. We were poor, but I only figured this out after I grew up and looked back. When I was growing up, my parents, my teachers and my local government somehow failed to tell us that we were part of the “poor class.”
In the schools I attended as a child, there were 45-50 children in each classroom. We had no air conditioning and no fans, yet I do not remember shutting down the school even one day for heat. After all, if we left school, we were all going home to houses that did not have air conditioning, either. Among my friends, many families did not own a car. Many lived in rental houses just as we did. Many of my friends wore clothes sewed by their mothers, just as I did. I even remember that my mother made my clothes with extra large seam allowances so they would accommodate more growth before they had to be replaced. It was one of many strategies she had for making do with the income my father earned. Style? We didn’t know the definition of the word. My friends and I also did not know that we were poor. I don’t remember our parents saying that we were poor. We just thought we were people, and we believed that when we grew up, we could shoot for the stars.
We lived in a classless society.
Democrats live in a society where class distinctions are critical to their political agenda, and they cannot rally people without putting them into classes. Democrats allege to believe that the reason some people have more than others is that those with more have robbed those with less. Defining the people who belong to the class of robbers and the class of the robbed is a battle that occupies a great deal of time. Proclaiming how the government will rob the robbers and reimburse the robbed is their whole platform.
John McCain, Sarah Palin and the Republicans don’t know the definitions of the classes. This is a concept that American citizens understand. We all believe in our abilities, and we all wish government would get out of the way. The Republicans have spent their whole convention introducing us to people who accomplish big things. The Republican speakers show us what people can accomplish in this country if they dream big and work hard. They could not care less what class they belong to.
Thank you, Sarah Palin, for not mentioning the middle class. It would just confuse us. We are all proud to be American. When you expressed that same view, you demonstrated the only kind of class that matters to us.