The cynic in me

Here's yet another article on the difficulty low income families face, this time involving the challenges of college admissions:

Selective private colleges acknowledge that they sometimes take affluent teens over those from poor or middle-class families needing financial aid when deciding which students to admit from their waiting lists.

The reason, college administrators say, is that financial aid budgets often have been tapped out by the time those admissions are decided in May and June. The money has been allocated to students admitted earlier whom the schools most wanted to attract, rather than the backup choices typically relegated to the waiting list.

"It's the financial reality of things," said Paul Marthers, dean of admission at Reed College in Portland, Ore.

At Reed, where officials take pride in providing full aid packages to needy students, "Every year we have to decide, 'Can we give financial aid to students on the waiting list?' " Marthers said. Often by that point, "The financial aid is just used up."

Shortly after reading that, I came upon this post on class and marriage over at Pandagon, which reminded me of a post by Ezra on the difficulties of living on minimum wage and this post at TAPPED on the difficulty of upward class mobility derived from this New York Times article.

This all seems fairly intuitive to me. And I have a feeling if you lean liberal, it seems pretty intuitive to you as well. The more challenges that people face, the harder it is for them to succeed. Financial difficulties make it even harder. If you don't believe me, thumb through a copy of The Working Poor the next time you visit your local bookstore.

Now keep all that in mind as you read what this letter writer to the Corner has to say:

Jonah, I'm an undergrad at Miami University (in OH) and I'm spending my summer studying the election and the "emerging Republican majority" and how it will affect the country over the next few years. As soon as I started delving into the studies and analyses done on the subject, I started to realize what you just wrote your column about - the defining characteristics of Republicans seem to be optimism and patriotism, not wealth or class, and the reverse (pessimism and cynicism)best characterize Democrats.

Of course, according to those studies and articles above, that "optimism" that Republicans have is extremely unfounded (and on a side note, I think patriotism is in the eye of the beholder). And without class mobility, one of the "defining characteristics" of Republicans is little more than false hope and faith in non-reality. But most of us already knew that one.

That said, Democrats are not the party of "pessimism," but rather the party of realistic optimism. Democrats would like to see all Americans succeed, but Democrats also see the difficulties poor families face under current circumstances. It's why Democrats are busy proposing higher minimum wages and health coverage for children while their opponents fight to cut taxes for the wealthy, dismantle Social Security, inject themselves into private family disputes and the battle for judicial supremacy.