PERHAPS you remember the middle class. Its members are the folks who, in Bill Clinton’s words, “work hard and play by the rules” – and they have been whipsawing between the two political parties throughout the decade. Clinton and Ross Perot slaughtered President Bush in 1992 for having fallen out of touch with middle-class economic anxieties. The Republicans slaughtered the Democratics in 1994 by convincing middle-class voters that the Clinton administration and its allies in Congress did not share their socially conservative values.
But here’s something strange: Now, in the year 2000, the woes of the American middle class are going almost entirely undiscussed by the two presumptive nominees.
Instead, George W. Bush – you know, the guy who supposedly represents the party of the rich – is running a campaign of ideas that is geared primarily to helping Americans who earn less than $30,000. He has said his chief goal is to help working single mothers, who are surely the most sorely beset and overburdened folk in America.
“Ours is an age of unmeasured prosperity,” he said this week in a remarkable speech delivered in Cleveland. But, he warned, “At the edges of affluent communities, there are those living in prosperity’s shadow. The same economy that is a miracle for millions of Americans is a mystery for millions as well – Americans who live in a world above welfare’s assistance, but beneath prosperity’s promise.”
Bush is pushing innovative health-care ideas aimed at expanding local community care centers, and a family health-care credit for those without health insurance. He wants to remove 6 million people from the federal tax rolls. And his passionate advocacy of a variety of school-reform measures is intended to give poor kids a way out of bad public-education systems.
If you knit all these things together, what you have is something like a conservative version of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society – which is to say, a sustained effort to deal with the problems of American poverty without the ludicrous utopian notion that massive government spending could somehow bring poverty to an end.
So Bush proposes some tax credits here, some grants there, and some interesting “trust fund” ideas, particularly when it comes to matters like the construction of new charter schools. But his goal is to make it possible for “the American dream to reach every willing heart” – and that’s not a meaningless turn of phrase.
Remember, this is a conservative Republican speaking. But then, that’s not really surprising if you’ve been paying attention.
Ever since the election of Ronald Reagan, liberals have been in a defensive crouch as they seek to protect every dysfunctional program they created. In the meanwhile, policy wonks across the right were laying the intellectual groundwork for brilliant experiments like the privatization of public housing projects and welfare reform.
Meanwhile, canny Democratic politicians who were trapped inside an increasingly sclerotic New Deal coalition realized they had to convince voters they were not only interested in the poor and the unionized. In 1992, Bill Clinton saw that while the “common man” at the center of the New Deal Democratic coalition had been a blue-collar laborer working hard for little money, the new “common man” was a white-collar office worker living in the midst of a rapidly changing economy he did not understand. Clinton sought to turn the Democratic Party into “a modern, middle-class-centered bottom-up party,” to quote from Clinton pollster Stanley B. Greenberg’s excellent book, “Middle Class Dreams.”
The Democratic Party had finally learned what it had forgotten in the 1960s – how to represent the worries and grievances of middle-class voters. But in the wake of the peace and prosperity of the 1990s, the middle class isn’t so aggrieved.
That’s a problem for Al Gore, because while his boss did figure out how to frighten the middle class with talk about how it was being screwed and how its Social Security and Medicare were going to be taken away by the mean and vicious Republicans, Clinton has laid no blueprint for what to say to a contented middle class. And Gore needs a blueprint, because he sure doesn’t have any ideas of his own.
Maybe the American middle class is feeling so flush that, just like in the 1960s, it can afford a little noblesse oblige. It can afford to entertain some generous ideas about how to make things better for those who are less fortunate rather than simply asking what’s in it for them. If so, they need look no farther than Bush and his “compassionate conservatism.”
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