From the Note:
ABC News' Karen Travers reports that President Bush will kick off a "Heart and Soul of America" tour in today.
The President will deliver a new stump speech that will outline the themes he will focus on for the next month. The tour will take him to Grand Rapids, Michigan and on Saturday through Ohio and Pennsylvania, all critical battleground states.
The trip is part of the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign's offensive that will focus on the president's "positive vision for the future," BC04 spokesman Scott Stanzel said.
The title of the tour is not coincidental -- asked if this was a direct reaction to Senator Kerry's comments at the Radio City Music Hall fundraiser, about the artists being the heart and soul of America, Stanzel said "Sure."
"The President, as you've seen and talked about over the last few weeks, has talked about the people throughout the country who are working hard for their families and taking active roles in their communities, to make their towns a better place," Stanzel said. "They represent the heart and soul of the country, not the people that Senator Kerry praised at his Hollywood hatefest."
President Bush will emphasize his domestic agenda -- job training, health care, retirement security and economic growth. He will begin to preview his agenda to make America more job friendly, make work places more family friendly and help families and individuals succeed in a changing economy, ushering in an era of ownership.
The new stump speech will talk about "preparing Americans for success -- making sure they have the training they need to succeed in a changing economy, making America safe, strengthening families and communities, and the president will point to the significant progress of his Administration in those areas," Stanzel said.
There'll be a new slogan on the bus and a new phase of advertising, including a new ad released sometime this weekend.
The new stump speech, per a senior campaign adviser, "touches on flex time, spends time on ownership society, which, over the course of the month, will include Social Security. The reason for the timing is to come out at the beginning of a month that will start with Kerry up in the polls by aggressively articulating our vision for the future and to debate the competing and very different visions for the next 90 days."
I guess Mr. Bush doesn't see the irony in talking about flex-time after his recent cuts in overtime pay will force many people to work longer just to make what they made last year.
And he probably doesn't know just how ironic his talk about economic growth is. Many people didn't do so well last year. Or even the last few years. According to the New York Times:
Adjusted for inflation, the income of all Americans fell 9.2 percent from 2000 to 2002, according to the new I.R.S. data.
The unprecedented back-to-back declines in reported incomes was caused primarily by the combination of the big fall in the stock market and the erosion of jobs and wages in well-paying industries in the early years of the decade.
Before the recent drop, the last time reported incomes fell for even one year was in 1953. The only other time since World War II that the I.R.S. reported an interruption in income gains was from 1947 to 1949, but that was because of changes in the tax law at the time that affected how income was reported rather than an actual fall.
I guess he doesn't realize the irony of praising hard-working people when CEO pay keeps soaring while worker's wages keep shrinking.
By now he probably knows just how ironic it is to say he gave everyone a tax cut or to tout his tax "cuts" as the cure for every ill. But in case he doesn't here are the facts.
There is more irony inherent to Mr. Bush's "Heart and Soul" tour, like trying to pass himself off as a champion of social security or having the nerve to talk about "ownership society" when he allows big corporations to to own our society. More on that later.
