Yesterday, I had a short post on "Is Our Wages Growing?", which highlighted newly-released data on declining real wages and a front-page New York Times article on same. (I should also mention that the the Sunday Times also had a good Edmund Andrews column on how the shortfall of jobs is actually much worse than the Kerry campaign says, since there are millions of discouraged job-seekers out there who left the labor force in the last few years and who are only now starting to re-enter it. Their large numbers help keep the unemployment rate up and real wages down.)

And, lo and behold, today's Washington Post bring this news--that leading GOP pollster, Bill McInturff, is now recommending that Republicans re-adjust their economic message. According to McInturff, "voters are far more responsive to Sen. John F. Kerry's economic message that talks about a middle-class squeeze than to President Bush's efforts to change public perceptions by talking up recent economic statistics" Therefore, instead of dwelling on these statistics and asserting the economy is doing great (or, as a certain leading Republican politician puts it "strong and getting stronger"), Republicans, McInturff says, need to highlight their concrete plans to make the economy work better.

Of course, the devil's in the details on these concrete plans. McInturff claims that voters will swoon over the GOP message of "additional tax cuts for businesses or tax cuts to help small businesses provide health insurance to their workers". I'm not so sure. While perhaps better than talking about economic statistics, this prescription sounds suspiciously like the economic medicine the Bush administration has been peddling for years. Why would voters get that excited about more of the same? And isn't it interesting that this is the best recommendation one of their smarter strategists can come up with?

But perhaps he has some constraints. Today's GOP is not noted for its open-mindedness and they are, after all, his clients.