No Names, Please

David Frum manages not to name check President Bush in this CNN screed. The very President Bush Frum "served as Special Assistant to the President for Economic Speechwriting from January 2001 to February 2002."

Only fair, of course. When savaging the economic effects of the G.W. Bush admin., one might not make a big deal of one's involvement.

From 2000 to 2007 -- before the onset of the recession -- the median wage actually declined and the average family's debt burden grew heavier.

Then came the economic crisis: 8 million jobs lost in half a year. Housing values collapsed. Savings disappeared.

While the unemployment numbers have improved a little recently, a cohort of young Americans risk losing half a decade of their lives to chronic under-employment -- even as workers 55 and older face prematurely and permanently reduced incomes.

And even as jobs return, it's not clear that incomes will recover.

There's accumulating evidence that upward mobility has broken down in this society. Poorer Americans find it harder to escape poverty than they did a generation ago. More bitter still, there is evidence that people born poor in America find it harder to escape poverty than do people born poor in many European societies, including those supposed backwaters of socialist stagnation, Germany and France.

The Democratic Party responds to those social challenges by offering more government, more regulation and more taxes. These are not Republican answers, obviously.

But what are the Republican answers? And who will offer them?

If Huckabee will not be that candidate, then who will?

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of David Frum.

How does Mr. Frum miss that the bleak jobless-recovery future of underemployed, immobile youth, reduced wages & no savings he so accurately projects is the "Republican answer?" (We would also like to know exactly what the question was.)

Almost missed this recap for the busy executive or semi-literate housefrau/retiree (It was under D.F.'s photo; immediate eye aversion.):

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• David Frum: Huckabee's announcement he won't run for president opens GOP void
• Huckabee had his flaws, but got job and mobility concerns of the middle class
• GOP candidates seem out of touch with Americans' worries on housing, jobs, economy
• Frum: Democratic fixes mean taxes, regulation. Not great, but where are the fixes from GOP?

Thanks, CNN. (Make that font larger if you expect to attract more "Boomer" eyeballs.)

Extra-amusing: "GOP candidates seem out of touch." Aren't they supposed to win on the economy? Are reactionary lunacy & kulturkampf that important, or is this some last ditch, passing-of-a-generation distraction before the masses realize* that thirty yrs. of disappearing taxes, deregulation & increasingly big & authoritarian (Hah: Civility!) gov't., no matter the rhetoric (More civility!) are (along w/ a war or five) the cause of the current economic slump?

*It could happen!