Losing the Middle/Working Class

Lot of people are writing about the decline of the middle/working class, including me.  According to Joan Williams, a California law professor, politically, the Obama administration has also lost the middle/working class:

At a forum Monday on jobs and the economy, a 30-year-old recent law school graduate who said he had been inspired by President Obama posed a straightforward question. It seemed to stump the president.

Obama's reply was strangely bloodless. He talked about people who were "treading water," but then he got bogged down in details about student loans. He didn't seem to connect with the frustration and pain he was hearing.

With even the president's fans talking to him this way, it's no surprise that the Democrats are in trouble as the midterm elections approach. The party seems incapable of getting its message across to a key group of voters: those who feel that the American dream is out of their reach.

Where the Democrats are failing to connect, the tea party is succeeding. That rising conservative movement has been extraordinarily good at tapping into the fury of American families who are neither rich nor poor, whose median income is $64,000 and who make up more than half of the nation's households.

I've believed since the beginning of 2009, that Obama seemed to be doing everything possible to lose his connection with the middle/working class voters, after having done so much to get them to vote for him. When he began appointing economic advisors like Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, who represent 'Wall Street' thinking, there were no equivalent advisors representing 'Main Street.'  I knew then, that Obama was going to be in trouble, losing the middle/working class independents (and disenchanting many progressives, who, while not themselves working class, hate the growing inequality of American society).

Of course the problem predates Obama.

For two generations, the Democrats have failed to relate to white working-class voters. Black working-class voters never abandoned the party, but the percentage of working-class whites who identified as Democrats fell from 60 percent in the mid-1970s to 40 percent in the mid-1990s. George W. Bush won his two presidential elections with landslides among white working-class men, while Obama lost among white working-class voters by 18 percentage points in 2008, roughly the same margin by which Al Gore lost them in 2000.

Democrats need to understand why Republicans have been so successful at courting working-class whites -- and why Democrats have been consistently unable to do so. Let's start with the tea party's battle cry to "restore America."

Restore what, exactly? For two generations after World War II, a blue-collar man could support his family; buy a house, car and washing machine; and send his kids to good public schools. The typical blue-collar household in 1973 was more than twice as well off as the equivalent household 25 years earlier. With the economy booming, the Democrats focused on universal social programs and provided Social Security, unemployment insurance, VA and FHA mortgages, educational benefits for veterans, good public schools and universities, and Medicare.

Then the economy shifted. The wages of high-school-educated men fell by nearly a fourth in the 1980s and 1990s. Family income fell less, but only because families sent wives into the labor force. While this was happening, the Democrats' social justice concerns moved away from universal economic entitlements and toward race, gender, the environment and gay rights.

When Democrats did address economic hardship, they focused on the poor through programs such as welfare, housing subsidies, Head Start and Medicaid. These programs mean that "the have-a-littles fight the have-nots" -- a description that a Brooklyn lawyer in the 1970s gave Jonathan Rieder in his book "Canarsie." A working-class housewife added: "The taxes go to the poor, not to us. . . . The middle-income people are carrying the cost of liberal social programs on their backs." That captures the enduring divide between working class voters and the Democratic Party.

In a country where it is so difficult to pass any social program, it may seem sensible to focus on the neediest. But politically, that has proved shortsighted -- a program for the poor alone is a poor program. Everyone likes universal initiatives; that's why trimming Social Security is the third rail of American politics. But means-tested programs, aimed at the poorest, fuel class conflict. Republicans have forged the idea that "the taxes go to the poor, not to us" into a full-blown attack on government. The tea party's "tea," of course, stands for "taxed enough already."

Democratic leaders can't seem to speak to working-class concerns in a way that doesn't alienate the very people they're trying to reach. Having ceded this cultural ground, they need to win it back.

Workers value directness as an expression of personal integrity. Obama's silver tongue highlights his elite education, while Sarah Palin's inarticulateness confirms her working-class bona fides. Remember when she wrote notes on her hand? She was just waiting for the elite to make fun of her -- a trap the president's press secretary obligingly fell into.

Republicans destroyed the New Deal coalition by appealing explicitly to white working-class culture in many instances, from Richard Nixon's talk about urban crime to George W. Bush's talk about family values. Democrats need to find ways to express their genuine and deep respect for working-class morality, something they can do without abandoning key commitments on issues such as same-sex marriage and the environment.

Democrats must show that they understand the pain and angst of the working class. They need to remind people that health-care reform wasn't about the poorest of the poor -- they were already covered. Rather, the effort was aimed at working families who couldn't afford care.

Watching Obama campaign in 2008, you'd never have guessed that a central challenge of his presidency would be figuring out how to connect with people. At that town hall Monday, a woman named Velma Hart told the president she was exhausted. "I voted for a man who said he was going to change things in a meaningful way for the middle class," she said. "I'm one of those people, and I'm waiting, sir."

She's still waiting for a good response. Hart later told reporters that she'd hoped for something "magical, very powerful" from Obama and that she was disappointed in his answer.

The president can't wave a magic wand and restore retirement savings or reduce unemployment. But he can make Hart, and millions like her, see that they have his attention and have engaged his imagination. That's all she wanted, really, as she explained in cable news interviews after the town hall: to know that he's thinking about people like her and wants to talk. President Obama and his team should be able to do that.