Wisconsin illustrates Hillary Clinton's middle-class message

[Updated 2:22 p.m.] There is no need for Hillary Clinton to immediately bash and thus elevate Scott Walker - - his record and outlook are not significantly different than the rest of his right-wing campaigning cohort - -  but at some point she should bring her listening tour to Wisconsin where her message about helping the middle-class is relevant and sorely needed

Wisconsin has had the highest population percentage fall from the middle-class as the state came nowhere close to adding the 250,000 jobs Walker repeatedly promised but failed to deliver, and has fallen on his trickle-down watch to 40th among the states in job creation from 31st, recent reports and data show. 

Not to mention Walker's surprise, 2010 attack on public-sector collective bargaining and take-home pay, his recent wink-wink, flip-flop signing of a state right-to-work law, and the impending repeal of the state's prevailing wage law - - another assault on good-paying, family-supporting blue-collar wages.

This recent report by the AP is a campaign theme or ad waiting for Clinton's people to craft it: 

Wisconsin has added private-sector jobs at a lower rate than the national average since July 2011 — six months after Walker took office. Walker promised in the 2010 campaign that if elected his policies would create 250,000 private sector jobs. But only about 145,000 such jobs were created over his first four years.

Wisconsin ranked 40th in private sector job growth for the 12 months ending in September, said the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Walker has called hiring in his state the "gold standard" for measuring his performance.

And the jobs being created in a state where Walker will not support an increase in the minimum wage from its federal floor of $7.25 - - in fact, Walker has said he sees no need for a minimum wage, period - - are all low-wage and very low-wage occupations - - again providing no pathway to the middle-class and embedding poverty more deeply - - as UWM data indicate.

These few lines from the UWM report say it all:

...all of the net job growth between 2010-2013 occurred in low wage occupations. More troubling still: over 60 percent of the 2010-2013 growth of employment in low-wage occupations in Wisconsin occurred in very low-wage occupations – those with median hourly wages below $10.00 (in inflation-adjusted 2013 dollars).