Terre Haute for Obama

Daily Talking Points

April 07, 2008Message of the day: Fighting for America’s middle class

• Barack Obama believes that to bring about real change for working Americans, we need to stand up to the special interests that have been setting the agenda in Washington for too long.

• We can trust Barack Obama to take on the special interests because he’s the one candidate who’s actually worked to rein in their power by passing far-reaching lobbying reforms in Illinois and in the U.S. Senate. And he’s the only candidate who isn’t taking a dime from Washington lobbyists on this campaign.

• Obama will fight for the middle class as President. He will pass universal health care by the end of his first term, saving the typical family up to $2500 a year. He’s the only candidate to propose a middle-class tax cut that will provide relief to 95% of working Americans – $1,000 per working family. He’ll also eliminate income taxes for any senior making less than $50,000.

• Obama has a job creation agenda that will create millions of new jobs and do it in a way that’s fiscally responsible. Obama will stop giving tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas and start giving them to companies that create jobs here at home. He’s proposed a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank that will invest $60 billion over ten years, and generate nearly two million new jobs – many of them in the construction industry that’s been hard hit by the housing crisis we’re facing. Obama will also put $150 billion over ten years into establishing a green energy sector that will create up to five million new jobs – and those are jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced.

• Obama has been fighting for working families for over two decades. As a community organizer, he helped provide job training for the jobless after the local steel plants closed; as a state Senator, he helped put $100 million in tax breaks into the pockets of working families and brought Democrats and Republicans together to expand health care for 150,000 children and parents. And that’s how you can trust that he’ll fight for the middle class as President.

Supporting struggling families

• On Friday, we learned that the economic crisis continues to spread to more American families, as we have now lost 232,000 jobs this year and the unemployment rate has reached its highest level since immediately after Katrina. This bad news is just the latest evidence that Washington needs fundamental change because it has failed the American people. For millions of unemployed Americans, the American Dream has been slipping away while their government has put special interests ahead of their interests.

• It’s time to turn the page on a Bush-McCain approach that tells Americans who are struggling that “you’re on your own” unless you have a lobbyist in Washington, because we’re not going to strengthen our economy unless we come together on behalf of our common prosperity. Instead of doing nothing for out-of-work Americans, we need a second stimulus that extends unemployment insurance and helps communities that have been hit hard by this recession. Instead of tolerating decades of rising inequality, we need to grow the middle class by investing in millions of new Green Jobs and rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. And after decades of flawed trade agreements and tax breaks that ship our jobs overseas, we need to invest in companies that create jobs right here at home.