With Economy Slowing, All Speeches Are Turning to It

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: With Economy Slowing, All Speeches Are Turning to It
By JOHN M. BRODER
Published: January 12, 2008

....Although the economy is sure to have evolved by Jan. 20, 2009, the campaign debate puts a new focus on how the candidates approach economic policy and highlights the partisan and ideological divides that President Bush and the Democratic-led Congress face in trying to settle on a package to blunt the effects of the slowdown.

The dialogue on Friday echoed that of 1992, when the economy was slowly emerging from a deep recession and Bill Clinton, the relatively unknown governor of Arkansas, defeated President George Bush by focusing almost exclusively on the financial struggles of the middle class.

“This economy may be working for some people but it sure isn’t working for everybody,” Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, said as she discussed a $70 billion stimulus plan to a local of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in City of Commerce, Calif. “One thing we have to decide is whether we are going to let this economy slide into a recession.”

John Edwards said that plan mirrored proposals he announced weeks ago in Iowa.

Campaigning on Friday in Summerville, S.C., Mr. Edwards pointed to his upbringing as the son of a mill worker to make the case that he is the candidate for the Democratic nomination “who understands what it means when the jobs leave, when the mills close, what it does to families, what it does to communities, and who has real ideas about what we can do about it.”...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/12/us/12campaign.html?ref=todayspaper