Middle Class

Rachel Maddow is going after McCain for never using the term "middle class" during last night's debate. He didn't say it in the first debate either, and Obama hit him for it.

I don't object to this being a Democratic message but on the merits it's very stupid. One of Rudy Giuliani's most annoying lines, and he used it constantly, was that Democrats never used the words "Islamic terrorists." Well Democrats aren't inclined to use "Islamic terrorists" out of a desire to be clear that it's the terrorism that is the problem rather than the Islam, and out of respect for people who might consider it a contradiction in terms. It's a semantic dispute not a national security dispute.

Republicans, for their part, don't talk about the "middle class" very much because Republicans like to stress that we're all one big American family, baby. This whole navel-gazing exercise of looking at a three-tiered distribution of wealth where some are "rich" and others "middle class" (and let's not even get into the poor), especially for taxation purposes, is irredeemably flawed. You logically can't do it because any definition of rich is too low.