Words Spoken: 18,562. Real Solutions for Working Families: ZERO

St. Paul, MN - The Republican National Convention is over. The confetti has been swept up, the microphones turned off, and those thousands of balloons are on their way to a long, long afterlife in a Minnesota landfill.

The numbers are in.

Despite a whopping 18,562 words uttered by the RNCC's major speakers over four nights, the issues of critical importance to millions of American families - the struggling economy, the rising cost of health care, the mortgage crisis - barely registered as a blip on the screen - even though the Labor Department announced today that the unemployment rate jumped to 6.1 percent from 5.7 percent in July - the largest monthly surge in the jobless rate in five years.

TOTAL WORDS SPOKEN: 18,562*

Total references to fixing the broken health care system: 3

Total references to concerns about the struggling economy: 4

Total references to creating new jobs: 10

Total references to the mortgage crisis: 2

What's more - Senator McCain's ONLY reference to health care got it wrong: contrary to his claim that his plan would "make it easier for more Americans to find and keep good health care insurance", Senator McCain's health care plan would make it harder for average American families to quality health coverage they can afford. http://craft-cdn.seiumedia.net/press/McCainhealthcareTextFINAL.pdf

It should come as no surprise that the pocketbook issues that are foremost in most voters' minds were ignored by John McCain and the RNC --- after all, just this week McCain's campaign manager admitted that from their point of view, "This election is not about issues."

*Speeches analyzed: John McCain, George Bush, Sarah Palin, Joe Lieberman, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Fred Thompson, Tom Ridge, Laura Bush and Cindy McCain.

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