As I exited the main lobby of Union Station I was approached by an individual who saw my press identification from the McCain event. She pointed me to the crowd at Liberty Memorial Park across the street. When I arrived at the location I found Bridgette Williams, Greater Kansas City AFL-CIO president, and Mike Sanders, Jackson County Executive, along with a backdrop of thirty or so AFL-CIO members and Obama campaign supporters.

Bridgette Williams, President of the Greater Kansas City AFL-CIO, and Mike Sanders, Jackson County Executive, at Liberty Memorial Park across from the entrance to Union Station.

Bridgette Williams’ statement for the media:

Today Senator John McCain will try to convince Missourians that his economic agenda represents a departure from the disastrous policies of George Bush. Bust as the old saying goes, “the proof is in the pudding.” The truth is that Senator McCain’s plan is little more than a carbon copy of the failed Bush agenda that has led to a rapidly collapsing economy. From skyrocketing gas prices to the health care crises, McCain offers more of the same…

…McCain’s ill conceived plan to extend the Bush tax breaks for the wealthy and add billions more in tax breaks for the health insurance industry and Big Oil is just one example of his misguided agenda for Missouri’s working families. He also supports unbalanced trade deals, privatizing Social Security, and taxing people’s health care benefits. Nearly every part of the McCain economic agenda mirrors the Bush adminstration’s failed approach. And McCain stubbornly refuses to stray even an inch from his most damaging recycled Bush proposal, to continue the war in Iraq for up to one hundred years, costing America’s taxpayers ten billion dollars every month and dragging down the fragile economy.

With no end in sight to the current economic downturn, the last thing Missouri working families need is another four years of senator McCain towing the same lines as President Bush, “you’re on your own.” Thousands of families are losing their homes to foreclosure, energy prices are skyrocketing, good jobs are moving overseas, forty seven million Americans without health care, including seven hundred seventy thousand right here in Missouri. More than one hundred sixty thousand people in our state are unemployed.

We call on Senator McCain to change course by listening to working families’ concerns and supporting our priorities like good jobs, health care for all and fair trade. Anything less simply won’t cut it with Missouri’s working people.