By Gene Meyer | Kansas Reporter

OSAWATOMIE — President Barack Obama traveled Tuesday to this small northeast Kansas community’s high school gym to decry a growing division of wealth in the United States that he said is creating a “make or break moment for the middle class.”

Don Davis, who for 20 years has been cutting hair in a 115-year-old storefront barber shop just off Main Street less than a mile from where the president spoke, jokingly offered his own solution for the problem.

“They could have just sent us the money they spent for the trip,” Davis said as he bantered with customer Gerald Stanley, a retiree from nearby LaCygne. “We’d be better off.”

But the president, speaking in the red, white and blue festooned Osawatomie High School gym hours later, likened the growing division to what President Theodore Roosevelt portrayed when Roosevelt chose Osawatomie to present his Square Deal proposals for federal regulatory and tax reforms in 1910.

“This isn’t just another debate,” Obama told a crowd estimated at 1,100 people at the high school.

“This is the defining issue of our time. This is a make or break moment for the middle class and all who are fighting to get into the middle class,” Obama said.

In his speech, Obama said the trickle down economic philosophy promoted by his Republican opponents might appeal to Americans' rugged individualism and skepticism of the government, but “it doesn’t work."

:It’s never worked. It didn’t work in the decade before the Great Depression," Obama said. "It’s not what led to the incredible post-war boom of the 1950s and '60s. And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade.”

The growing disparity of wealth in the United States, where CEOs of the nation’s largest companies make 110 times more than their employees do compared with 30 times more in the 1950s, hurts the economy, because consumers can’t afford to buy many things businesses produce, he said.

“It’s heartbreaking enough (that) there are millions of working families in this country who are now forced to (take) their children to food banks for a decent meal,” Obama said.

But after citing statistics projecting that children born in poverty now have a 30 percent chance of being middle-income earners as adults, compared with a 50 percent chance just after World War II, “the idea that those children might have no chance to climb out of that situation and back into the middle class, no matter how hard they work … is wrong,” Obama said to standing applause.

The president called for broad investments in education, science, research and high-tech manufacturing, and for jobs programs to hire unemployed construction workers for infrastructure projects to help broaden the national base of consumer wealth. But he gave no details of specific new programs to accomplish his goals.

Reaction to the hour-long speech was overwhelmingly favorable among many area listeners, who earlier began lining up in chilly near-freezing temperatures Saturday evening for tickets that were distributed noon Sunday.

First Option Bank CEO Greg Lewis, of Osawatomie, said he liked the speech despite the president’s outlining of banking and financial abuses blamed as contributors to the nation’s current economic problems.

“He (the president) was talking about Wall Street, not Main Street,” Lewis said.

Kansas Democratic Party Chairwoman Joan Wagnon of Topeka lauded the speech, but conceded that, in heavily Republican Kansas, getting legislators who oppose the president’s political proposals to change their minds would be difficult.

“What changes legislators’ minds is the public,” Wagnon said, “and I think the president is trying to tell people to contact their legislators.”

 Amanda Adkins, chairwoman of the Kansas Republican Party, called Obama’s economic record “all rhetoric and no results.”

Adkins said, in a formal statement issued by the party, that when Roosevelt visited Osawatomie in 1910, federal spending represented 2 percent of the nation’s GDP, compared with 25 percent now.

“It is time for a return to fiscal responsibility and limited government,” Adkins said in the statement.

U.S. Rep Lynn Jenkins, R-District 2, which includes Osawatomie, said the president missed the point of Roosevelt’s 1910 call for a New Nationalism embodying the Square Deal principles Roosevelt outlined then.