The Arbitrary ChuckJerry

I was reading an article in the New York Times Magazine about Eliot Spitzer and his upcoming run for governor of New York. In the same magazine was an article about how liberalism as we know it today was invented in New York. Anyway, I was thinking about both of these two articles, along with watching the Sunday political shows and I had a thought.

Democrats are essentially credited with inventing the middle class. I guess starting with FDR through Kennedy and the rise of the suburbs and what not. There's probably someone who can give better evidence than I can, but I'm not going to give you any at the moment, partly because I don't feel like going back to read the articles again. Anyhow, let's take that as a given unless you vehemently disagree.

My point is that Democrats were so successful at inventing this middle class that now their efforts are taken for granted. Those in the middle class are firmly entrenched in it and don't see themselves slipping out of it barring a move upward in class. It's also not a huge leap to take someone from the lower to the middle class nowadays given certain opportunities. The middle class is now therefore a starting point, rather than an end in itself. As this is such, middle class voters don't see the need to vote Democratic just so they can hold on to their middle class lifestyles.

The Democrats did such a good job at inventing their own voting base that they've, in essence, rendered themselves obsolete. Middle class voters are now more comfortable voting for someone who's promising them more money in their pockets or who will espouse their religious values.

The one article was saying how Eliot Spitzer is trying to tear down that perception, since it's not as true as the middle class thinks it is. Spitzer feels that they are still being exploited and has made his career out of exposing upper class corruption and corporate fraud. He's fighting to take back the middle class.

Here's an alarming statistic. In 1996 when Clinton got reelected the threshold salary at which people were more likely to vote Democratically was about $49,000. Anyone making more than that was more likely to vote Republican. In the most recent election the threshold Democratic salary was roughly $23,000. That's an enormous drop. Somehow a majority of the people making $30,000 a year have decided that the Republicans best represent their economic and social needs within the last ten years. That's really astounding to me. Plus more middle class Americans have become investors thanks to the tech boom and the advent of online research and trading. Investors are predominantly Republican, apparently.

On top of all of this the Republicans have done an outstanding job of hijacking the Democratic base, namely middle class white guys. They only run on 2 or 3 issues at a time and pound the hell out of them until people actually start to believe them. By far the worst political promise of the last 25 years was Dubya saying that he wanted to be a "uniter and not a divider", but he said that shit so much that people just believed him. The second time around his rhetoric was entirely different.

I think even the Democrats are complacent at the moment with the Republicans in control. They're still not fighting to put out one message, nor are they adequately pouncing on the Republican turmoil from DeLay to Frist, Rove to Cheney, and all the little people under them. Not to mention the huge messes in Iraq and N'awlins.

Anyway, my feeling is that the Democrats, to a certain extent, were too successful in entrenching middle class values to the American suburbanites, obviously culminating with Bill Clinton around 1999 or so. Now they're fighting to find a new message.