Tara Leslie, Cary's wife, has been praying for President Bush, too, and now she is saying, "I think it's so important to have a society of moral absolutes."

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"Jobs will come and go. But your character — you have to hang on to that," he [husband Cary Leslie] says. "It's what you're defined by." [Full article from The Washington Post.]

Can governments really deliver economic well-being to the working poor? That it can indeed so deliver has been the central plank of Democratic Party for the past 50 years; I am not sure the Democrats have in fact delivered. At best, the government can open up opportunities — education, financial incentives for savings, job training — for the poor to pulled themselves out of their poverty; but the government can't do the pulling for the poor any more than the poor can be made to disappear by throwing money at them. The Left simply cannot keep on promising the poor a pie in the sky that they can't possibly deliver — that is dishonest and manipulative, and eventually, people won't believe anything you say anymore, even if it is true.

The Republicans can't deliver the poor either, and they don't promise to do so. But at least they offer the frustrated working poor a sense of righteousness and self-esteem; talk is cheap enough.