A Time to Fight

On Saturday, I picked up a copy of Jim Webb's "A Time to Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America". If you don't know who Jim Webb is, he is the junior U.S. Senator from Virginia. He will become the senior senator upon the retirement of John Warner in January 2009.

I am specifically interested in Senator Webb's comments on the middle class. While Senator Webb served in the Reagan administration, he has since taken on a much more liberal stance on economic issues. I recall one quote on page 39, speaking of the middle class of our great nation... (by the way, Ronald Reagan once referred to the United States as a "shining city on a hill")

"But the 'shining city' was no accident. It did not just happen. Nor was it simply the creation of a group of propertied intellectuals who sat down and wrote a document saying that this is what the country was going to look like and this is what its people were going to do. That shining city was built one brick at a time with human hands and human sacrifice, after a great deal of struggle by farmers, laborers, and soldiers who believed in the validity of our system, and who had to fight against the odds and the elements the get to the top of the hill before they could begin building the city in the first place."

I think that it is time that we have leaders who legitimately believe in the power of the middle class and that recognize that our economy is not a tool by which our leaders, whether in government or the private sector, can take advantage of the middle, working class in order to make themselves wealthier.

I'll post more with other insights about the rest of his book (I'm about half of the way through now).

Keep on believing.