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INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

American politics

FIGHTING FOR THE MIDDLE GROUND:
THE ROLE OF THE MIDDLE CLASS IN THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN

Analysis by Edward Field

There is no way anyone could have missed it. In this election cycle, more than in any other, we were bombarded with references to the middle class.

Politicians crooned to it. Then they threw tax cuts at it. Newspapers told us it was shrinking. And pundits like Kevin Phillips told us it had reached a "boiling point." Then followed an endless stream of doomsayers, warning of middle-class "anxiety," a rise in selfishness or an erosion of middling values.

So why was everyone talking about it? And what, exactly, is the middle class?

Ask Americans themselves and you find the concept is broad indeed. Some 80 percent of those surveyed routinely declare that they are in it. In this country, the definition of middle class encompasses many more people than the managers and professionals — lawyers, doctors and teachers that Europeans understand the term to include.

Here the term extends, as one person put it, to "basically anyone who has a job." Thus, the middle class is anyone who is not exceedingly rich or a dejected member of the underclass.

Politicians share the broad definition. Consider Bob Dole, who frequently referred to the middle class during the campaign. In Chicago, when he launched his economic plan last August, Dole set the stage by declaring that "the rich are getting richer and the middle class is being left behind." His solution was to reduce by half taxes on a "middle class family," which he defined as a family making $35,000. It was clear, however, that Dole was reaching out to a wide slab of the population. His proposed job training tax deductions could appeal to manual workers; his capital gains cut and write-offs for college loans would appeal to wealthier members of the middle class.

President Bill Clinton had a similar approach. His message in 1996 was pitched at the middle class, just as it was in 1992. Thus, when he toured the Midwest by train before the Democratic National Convention, he talked of the "forgotten middle class," reheating rhetoric from his campaign four years earlier. In 1995 he unveiled the "Middle Class Bill of Rights," and he supplemented it this year with further promises of tax cuts.

Who was Bill Clinton targeting? Virtually everyone: All families with kids would get tax credits; there was help for job training and college. But just to let the upper middle class know that they were not left out, Clinton also proposed eliminating the capital gains tax on home sales for profits of up to $500,000.

Neither candidate defined the middle class — nor is there an official government definition. But Bill Clinton came close to it with his Bill of Rights. When his program was outlined in the 1995 budget document, a table was attached outlining the lackluster growth in middling household incomes. The table used quintiles (fifths) of the population, as does the U.S. Census Bureau, and it defined as middle class the middle three-fifths. That represents 60 percent of households, those with incomes from $14,400 to $65,124 annually.

The way people define the middle class, needless to say, turns out to have much to do with what they want to say about it.

And in recent times, the most common argument has been that the middle class has fallen on hard times. This was the point the president was making when he isolated the middle 60 percent of households to show that their household incomes did not grow as quickly in the 1980s as the top 20 percent — and that their incomes actually declined for most of the 1990s.

But the argument is still clouded. For one thing, the nature of "households" has changed. More divorce and more people living alone have led to an increase in the number of households, depressing the figures for both average and median incomes. Confusing the issue further, median household income turned upward in 1995 for the first time in six years.

Another definition comes from those who argue that the middle class is shrinking. For that purpose, it is obviously not possible to define the middle class as a constant 60 percent of all households. Instead, it is often defined as a group of people making a certain income.

This is how the Chicago Tribune defined it last year when the newspaper ran a series on the decline of the middle class. The middle class was defined as households with incomes between $25,000 and $75,000.

The Tribune series observed that in 1993 a smaller proportion (71 percent)

26 / November 1996 Illinois Issues

of households fell into that category than in 1973 (75 percent) after adjusting for inflation.

But that does not prove that the middle class has been facing harder times. Indeed, the main reason for the "shrinkage" is that more people have moved into the $75,000 and up bracket than have fallen below it. Besides, census data released this year shows that the $25,000 to $75,000 bracket is growing again.

While these qualifications are important, the question remains: Why do politicians find it useful to make generalizations about the middle class? The answer is clearly that many people identify with the term. And that is due to the distinctive quality of American class definitions: Almost every one hinges on measures of income. Such a measure allows the category that encompasses middle class to be stretched as broadly as people want.

This contrasts with the more narrow European definitions, which peg the middle class to certain occupations, levels of education or "ideologies."

In fact, in traditional Marxist analysis, class depends upon one's position in the economy. If you are engaged in producing goods — as a factory worker or a farm laborer — you are not middle class but working class. And, indeed, that class has often been seen as the most numerous and politically important. On the other hand, managers who live off the production of others are middle class, or as the French say, "bourgeois." At the top is a small class of capitalists who live off the income of their investments.

In keeping with this analysis, it is interesting to note that the French government keeps track of people by occupation. National statistics include categories such as ouvriers (workers) cadres moyens (low-level professionals) or patrons de I'industrie (you guessed it: bosses).

In America, no such categories are monitored. And, even in academia, mainstream sociology has not dwelled much on dividing classes by occupation or otherwise. So the definition of class remains loose.

This is what makes the term handy for politicians. It means that appealing to a middle class does not exclude people. Better still, such a term can serve as an umbrella, encompassing people with otherwise distinct agendas.

No better example of this can be found than Clinton's campaign in Michigan in 1992. He was able to address a church of black voters in central Detroit and urge them to make common cause with the white blue-collar voters in neighboring Macomb County, uniting them behind his "program to restore the middle class." A foreign observer might have been surprised to hear disaffected auto workers or inner-city African Americans described as middle class.

Interestingly, many European politicians have come to see the wisdom of the strategy. Even in Britain, where the British Labour Party was once the definitive example of a working-class movement, there has been a commitment to "escape simply from being a narrow class-based party." The party's leader, Tony Blair, made this clear when he observed recently — possibly not without some irony — that "a lot more people are middle class nowadays. "

Edward Field is a Chicago-based reporter for an international business magazine. He has previously written for Illinois Issues on corporate hog farms, federal agricultural policy and the Chicago Board of Trade.

Focus on Illinois

Harping on the grievances of Middle Americans has played well in Illinois. Isn't there something odd about that?

Overall, the latest census figures reveal that this was one of 11 states that recorded an increase in median income in 1995 over 1994. The Midwest as a whole did well: Median income shot up by 7 percent, whereas almost every other region remained stagnant.

Yet, from his 1992 victory, Bill Clinton knew he had a winner when he talked of the middle class' feeling of being harried and neglected. As he memorably put it, the 1980s were a time when "the rich could get the gold mine, while the middle class got the shaft." That message played particularly well in Illinois, which turned out to be his second strongest state.

Why, though, was it so successful again this time around? From the launch of his Middle Class Bill of Rights in early 1995, it was clear that Illinois was going to be with him again. The president made Galesburg his first stop when he launched his plan last January in his attempt to come back from the humiliation of the Republicans' Contract With America. His Galesburg speech was greeted with thunderous applause. Moreover, members of the audience warmed to the hard-done-by theme.

Yet Galesburg — and indeed all of the state — has been on a roll for at least three years. Galesburg's economy is doing well; those charged with the community's economic development will happily tell you it is busily turning itself into a warehouse and distribution center. Its unemployment rate is under 5 percent.

To the north, Rock Island is booming. To the south, Peoria is still celebrating its revival. Labor strife at Caterpillar has been offset by its carefully nurtured emergence as a small regional center for information and technology industries. Peoria now has companies providing advertising, design and data services all over the country. It also recently won the U.S. Post Office's 800-job electronic mail encoding center. These triumphs, coupled with gambling and its multimillion dollar riverfront retail development, would make Peoria an unlikely place for talk of economic insecurity to "play well."

Yet, in spite of the good times, Midwesterners remain susceptible to talk of hard times. The international polling firm Roper Starch picked this up too. The Midwest in 1996 came up as the most positive area in consumer confidence. It polled high for people feeling good about their work. No other region could boast a lower percentage of people reporting outright job losses, cutbacks in overtime or other benefits. Nevertheless, according to the poll, the Midwest remains the area most fearful about the future of its jobs.

Edward Field

Illinois Issues November 1996 / 27