hy do they call it Labor Day when it was designed as Loafing Day?
It's only the one day out of 365 commemorating the toil of the sweaty miner, harried waitress, grizzled fisherman, the pliant people who pick produce and clean hoppers and remake hotel beds, the horny-handed husbandman and roofers toasted by 98-degree sojourns applying tar or shingles.
Like the crude rock pile of Stonehenge, Labor Day is a memorial erected in one era that remains inviolate for a subsequent era that regards it with more curiosity than comprehension. The cleavage between working class and middle class that rent Europe for centuries never took hold here. The mass rallies of Europe's labor movement, the formation of workers' political parties and socialist affinity groups, none of those attempts to unite the workers of the world caught on for long here.
In the present mature stages of the longest economic expansion on record, workers are employed at near-record levels (96 percent), even the Republicans in Congress are conceding ground on the question of raising the minimum wage over 6 bucks an hour, and prosperity is so widespread among the top four-fifths of households that the presidential race hinges on symbolic issues labeled ''family values'' and ''morality'' and which ticket can appear more devout, more domestic, more ''faith-based.''
Why? You win national elections in this country by appealing to the middle. You can have subtle gravitation to right or left, you can have sly tricks up your sleeve or harbor private intent to reward one interest or punish another. But you have to appear to be on the side of the little guy and the little gal, the humble worker and said humble worker's dear ones.
Thus the Republicans' tax cut schemes, or the Democrats' prescription drug subsidies, are pitched in such a way as to cleave the undecided bloc in favor of the aforesaid. Human nature being what it is, we tend to divide ourselves by what we have and what we want.
The Republicans are the party of the well-off and those who wish to be, plus those who suspect or resent the government in all or some of its aspects, i.e. making laws about guns, banning school prayer, enforcing tax levies. The Democrats have a wider potential base, but a narrower participation rate. The Dems have their well-heeled or muscular adherents - trial lawyers, unions, minorities, the less-well-off, and the Great Unwashed, who require more in the nature of government aid than the business go-getter types.
Every presidential contest hinges on which party swipes most of the middle, the 10 to 20 percent of moderate, perhaps only mildly interested folks. When only half the potential voters 18 and over actually vote, the contest becomes an intricate game of discouraging the other side's turnout and maximizing yours, in the five or 10 states from New Jersey west to Michigan that typically decide close elections.
FDR saved capitalism from itself in the Great Depression. The aristocratic democrat, also a Democrat, became the greatest president of the 20th century because he faced down the most daunting challenges: the enemies within, depression and national demoralization, then the enemies without, in the great war against facism. But the South that was solidly Democratic in FDR's four terms turned its back on the national Democrats over civil rights and the empowerment of black voters.
Nixon, Reagan, and Bush the Elder cozied up to white Southerners and stroked their desires. Carter once and Clinton twice proved that a Southern moderate Democrat could reclaim some electoral votes below the Mason-Dixon line. Each quadrennial Labor Day ushers in the Olympics and then the presidential election. The flag-waving commercialized by the sponsoring Olympic network and its sponsoring sponsors prepares us for the bluster and blatherskiting of the election. Chest-beating, podium-pounding, baby-bussing, saber-rattling, and crow-eating are rampant.
It's all for the benefit of the undecided voter, presumed to follow her or his inclination as to which choice is in her or his best interest. Slicing the undecided voter pie is a matter of careful calibration. Is the household of Mr. and Mrs. Undecided earning more, but working longer hours? Does day care outweigh gun ownership at that address? Is the estate tax or the co-pay on Granny's meds the cutting issue?
Never has a politician addressed the problem of the worker more succinctly than in the story Ted Kennedy tells of his first Senate race, in the 1962 primary against Eddie McCormack, who had scornfully said young Ted ''had never worked a day in your life.'' As Kennedy tells it, he ran into a longshoreman next morning who pumped his hand, reminded Kennedy of the McCormack jibe, and said, ''Kid, you haven't missed a thing.''
Not till the last burger has been broiled, the last potato chip crunched, will the attention of the great glob of undecideds turn to the decision of the first Tuesday in November. Most Americans haven't been paying attention. Slowly, with a sigh, they'll start perusing the papers and the news with more attentiveness. The debates will sharpen the choice.
The polls point to a close contest. The needle will swing back and forth. The scale can be tipped by the flightiest breeze. A ridiculous gaffe, an unimagined event, a foreign crisis, a ghost from the past, almost anything can tip the outcome. The Republican says America has gotten worse since his daddy was minding the store, the military is falling apart, government is screwed up. The Democrat says there have never been better economic times, the United States leads the planet like never before, and the other guy would wreck this good thing we have going here.
The undecided voters? They say, ''Can I have a little more barbecue sauce on that little baby?'' This is why Labor Day is more like the Fourth of July than Christmas or New Year's: It testifies to the power of the people to wrest from the powerful interest groups, the bosses, a long weekend, a paid holiday, a chance to savor the end of summer. And it ushers in the climax of choosing-up-sides that determines how we'll be governed for the next four years.
David Nyhan is a Globe columnist.
