For candidates of both political parties, ”the middle class” is the poster child of Campaign `92.
Across New Hampshire, rival presidential candidates eagerly elbow each other out of the way as they hotly pursue ”the middle class.”
Democratic front-runner Bill Clinton calls it the ”forgotten middle class,” as if it were the girl next door, long scorned but emerging suddenly, ravishing and enticing on the arms of another boyfriend.
That boyfriend might be President Bush, whose popularity soared in the aftermath of Desert Storm, only to plummet amid the economic sag of recent days and force him, too, to woo the middle class.
White House leakers say the president plans to promise that dear, beloved middle class some well-deserved tax relief in his State of the Union address. Alas, if only the candidates would say which ”middle class” they are so passionate about.
Is it the government`s statistical version, the demographic bulge that hovers just above and below the nation`s $35,000 median household income? Or is the abstract notion of middle class that each American seems to carry around in his or her head?
Politicians abhor specificity, so they`re probably talking about the abstraction, the great 85 percent or so of the American public that think they are middle class, regardless of whether demographers would classify them as
”middle income.”
They can include the LaSalle Street stockbroker trying to make the rent on his $1,000-a-month Lincoln Park apartment or the Southwest Side truck driver trying to keep up the mortgage on his bungalow.
In America, ”middle class” is more than income; it is values. It is the sense that one is a part of the mainstream, too enterprising to be poor and too industrious ever to settle into the leisure class, even if that lucky lottery ticket came through.
The term middle class originally was applied to those independent, in-between folks who were not locked into one class or another by accident of birth. They included burghers, artisans, shopkeepers or wage laborers. They inherited neither nobility nor serfdom.
America, a land that glorified liberty and opportunity in an industrializing world, also glorified the middle class in such a way that office seekers have come to see it as a motherlode of votes.
That`s why the Democratic pack now tries desperately to avoid the appearance of caring too much for the poor at the expense of ”the middle class,” and why President Bush and his challengers are trying just as hard to avoid the appearance of having helped a few rich get much richer in the go-go `80s, again at the expense of ”the middle class.”
Class politics are convenient only so long as the language is kept abstract. And as an abstraction, the middle class is important not because of the income brackets it denotes but because of the values it implies.
Ronald Reagan, a former Roosevelt Democrat, won millions of other former Roosevelt Democrats to his side by persuading them that the Democratic Party had been overtaken by radical, McGovernite liberals.
It was so successful a pitch that it drove the Democrats back into the huddle to figure out how to win their old supporters back. They appear to have decided that two can play at the game of wooing the middle class.
In the early 1960s, conservatives challenged the Republican Party to offer a choice, not an echo-a set of genuine, challenging alternatives to popular Democratic ideas. Today both parties echo appeals to the middle class, but so far without giving much indication that they really know whom they are talking to.
