I was talking to a few friends of mine who are staunch supporters of the Democrats. One thing that I found interesting was that these people were working middle-class professionals. The kind of people that are the targets of Democratic taxes and income redistribution schemes and not the recipients of government handouts. The one mantram that came out of each person is, "the Republicans are only for rich corporations." I always felt that this belief was more due to successful Democratic propaganda than the actual truth but after 7 years of George Bush, it is hard to argue the point. Not only does George Bush and the formerly Republican led Congress appear to be working for big corporations, they seemed to be mostly concerned that the board of directors for these corporations should make as much money as possible. Why else would this administration seem to take such a casual approach to attempts by our foreign competitors to get control of sensitive American assests? And I find disturbing the GOP's slavish devotion to the ideas of global free trade even when our trading partners are violating the rules to gain competitive advantages over American companies.

If the GOP wants to reverse this slide in popularity, they need to be more concerned with Main Street. They need to gear their policies to help small businesses and working Americans. Republicans like to say they are strong on the economy, but our economy is based on a strong middle-class. But the middle-class has been under assault, their wages are down due to foreign competition, illegal immigrants, and corporations moving good jobs over seas and the GOP doesn't seem to be doing anything about this. There are probably more conservative people in this country than liberal, but many conservative and moderate people will vote Democratic because of this beliefs that Republicans only favor the rich. I think many conservative minded people will vote for Democrats to punish the Republicans. Unfortunately this only emboldens the Democrats to pursue their socialist agenda.

To protect our society from the cancerous creep of socialism, the GOP needs to stand up and work more for the American middle-class and less for corporate boardrooms.

- Thomas Paine 2

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