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GOP Discovers Income Inequality, Just in Time for Campaign Season

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

Politics sometimes leads to poetic justice. Sarah Palin can no longer mock President Barack Obama's use of a teleprompter after her own teleprompter froze mid-speech.

The calamity occurred at Republican Rep. Steve King's Iowa Freedom Summit in Iowa last weekend, leaving her to ad-lib a word salad of red-meat applause lines for her conservative audience, such as this:

"The man can only ride you when your back is bent. So strengthen it! Then the man can't ride you, America won't get taken for a ride, because so much is at stake."

And this:

"Now the press asks, the press asks, 'Can anyone stop Hillary?' " she said of Democrat Hillary Clinton who is widely expected to run in 2016. "Again, this is to forego a conclusion, right? It's to scare us off, to convince us that -- a pantsuit can crush patriots."

With that, Palin inadvertently demonstrated a peculiarity of political rally speeches: What you say doesn't matter as long as your audience knows when it is time for them to clap.

 

Yet, as the political landscape shifts in President Obama's final two years in office and the presidential race heats up, I am encouraged to hear signs that a serious debate may yet manage to squeeze its way through the usual sound bites.

Remember how the president made "middle class economics" the theme of his State of the Union Address? I heard that as a new spin on an old theme from Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign: the "forgotten middle class." They still feel forgotten.

That's why, even before Obama's speech, top Republicans signaled a new embrace of a theme that they usually have denounced as "class warfare" when it was brought up by Democrats: income inequality.

How did they pull off this switcheroo? Simple. They blamed the inequality on Obama.

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(c) 2015 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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