"Now we have to get out there and see that they are all elected," said Jeff Wiggins, council president. "We need to keep our friends in the House and Senate."

But he made one of the most memorable quips of the campaign. When asked about same-sex marriage, Sharpton said he was less concerned about whom people slept with and more concerned that they’d have a job to go to when they got up in the morning.

The economy has lost 2.2 million jobs since January 2001, when George Bush was inaugurated. He has the poorest job creation record of any president since Herbert Hoover. That’s a big reason Bush is trailing John Kerry in the polls.

The GOP faithful are jumpy over jobs. House Speaker Dennis Hastert is in full CYA mode. He denounced Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, for describing the shipping of American jobs abroad as "just a new way of doing international trade."

Bush said almost the same thing in his report on the economy. "When a good or service is produced at lower cost in another country, it makes sense to import it rather than to produce it domestically," it read. "This allows the United States to devote its resources to more productive purposes."

Jobs have become a major U.S. export during the Bush presidency. That’s why Dubya would rather talk social issues. Gay marriage is his demon du jour. "When Bushes get in trouble, they look around for a politically advantageous bogeyman," wrote New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

The GOP has been trolling for working class votes with social issues sucker bait for years. They’ve hooked more than a few union members. But Republican pandering to what a western Kentucky union leader calls the "Three Gs -- God, Guns and Gays" might not work as well this time. Union members seem more focused on the "Three Js -- Jobs, Jobs and Jobs."

Bush says cutting taxes for business makes the economy boom. It’s called trickle-down economics.

Trickle-down economics gave us the Depression and the Reagan recession, the worst economic downturn since the Depression. Under Bush, trickle-down economics is turning factory workers into Wal Mart cashiers.

Here’s how trickle-down economics works in theory: You cut taxes and government regulations on business. Business owners make more money. They use the extra cash to create better products, give workers raises and hire more people.

In practice, trickle-down economics has worked very differently. In the 1920s, business owners mainly pocketed their windfall, used it to buy machines that could replace workers or speculated with it on the stock market or in other get-rich-quick schemes. All three presidents in the 20s -- Republicans Harding, Coolidge and Hoover -- were trickle-downers. "The business of the country is business," Coolidge said.

Greed was the trickle-down gospel. The faithful preached "free enterprise," meaning union free.

Corporate profits zoomed 62 percent and dividends 65 percent between 1923 and 1929, according to historian William E. Leuchtenberg. In the same period, worker wages increased only 11 percent, he added.

Hoover was in office when the stock market crashed. But the crash didn’t trigger the Great Depression. Mainly, the boom went bust because American employers believed in maximizing profits and minimizing wages.

"As industrial and agricultural production increased, the proportion of the profits going to farmers, workers and other potential consumers was too small to create an adequate market for the goods the economy was producing," historian Alan Brinkley explained. "Even in 1929, after nearly a decade of economic growth, more than half of the families in American lived on the edge of or below the minimum subsistence level -- too poor to buy the industrial goods the economy was producing."

FDR came along in the 30s and junked trickle-down economics. He put people to work with the New Deal. He and like-minded Democrats gave workers the right to join unions.

As union membership increased, the middle class grew. "Union wages buy more," said a novelty license plate the Kentucky State AFL-CIO put out. The message was true. Union members bought homes, cars and other consumer goods; the economy boomed with workers sharing the wealth as never before.

Trickle-downers never forgave "that man" FDR. In 1980, their man, Ronald Reagan, got elected president. He resurrected trickle-down economics. Massive joblessness followed. Unemployment topped 10 percent.

Trickle-down is back with Bush. Business beneficiaries of the Bush tax breaks have found a new way to use their trickle-down largesse: opening more plants and outsourcing more work in cheap-labor Third World countries.

As a result, stateside plants are closing, and union jobs are disappearing. But they’re hiring non-union at Wal Mart, and that suits Dubya. ''America's economy is strong and getting stronger," the president says.

Admittedly, he didn’t start the process of outsourcing and the sending of U.S. jobs overseas. He’s just accelerated it to warp speed.

But jobless Americans, cheer up. The president will save the country with a constitutional amendment to keep gay people from getting hitched. Dubya loves God and guns, too.