Lee's Political Opinion: For middle class, hopelessness reigns

LeRoy Goldman
The Shadow Knows

Published: Sunday, May 5, 2013 at 4:30 a.m.

For middle class, hopelessness reigns

I've never ceased to be amazed at how frequently solutions to problems, even complex and controversial problems, remain out of reach even though those solutions hide in plain sight. Let's see if we can find a solution staring us in the face.

My sister and I grew up in a lower-middle-class family back in the '40s and '50s. Our family was not special. There were millions of families like ours. Our father was a high school graduate. Our mother was not. Neither of them attended college.

But both of them were passionate believers in the American Dream. They believed hard work coupled with determination and education would lead to a better life. And that is what they wanted for their children. They promised us a college education so long as we did our part every day in school. The sacrifices they willingly made stretched painfully over more than two decades. And their sacrifices and their confidence paid off for us in ways that went far beyond money.

But today that American Dream has become illusory for millions. The dream's promise lives on, but its reality has become nothing more than a gossamer for millions of Americans.

The Allstate-National Journal Heartland Monitor Poll, released 10 days ago, paints a grim picture of the middle class. Only 32 percent of Americans believe the nation is headed in the right direction. And they place the blame on Congress, President Barack Obama and the CEOs of major corporations and financial institutions.

Sixty-four percent of the middle class believe Congress is actually making things worse. Forty-five percent believe President Obama is making things worse, while only 36 percent believe he's making things better. Fifty-five percent believe the titans of major corporations and Wall Street are making things worse.

Fifty-nine percent of those polled expressed concern about falling out of the middle class. For them, middle class has now been redefined to mean not falling behind rather than getting ahead. Their biggest fear is losing their job.

Only 43 percent of the middle class believe they have the opportunity for financial and professional growth, buying a home, or saving and investing for the future. Most of them believe paying for a child's education is now out of reach. Up to a third of them believe affording quality health care, job security and yearly vacations is only attainable by the upper class, the top 2 percent of the population.

The middle class want policymakers in Washington and the private sector to increase economic growth and job creation. They want pathways that will enable them to attain higher education, which they now believe is affordable only for the upper class.

Writing about this in The New York Times on April 26, Charles Blow cited data from two recent Pew Research Center studies that found that since 2000 the middle class has grown smaller and fallen backward in income and wealth. The most recent study, released just last week, found that during the first two years of the nation's recovery from the current recession the mean net worth of households in the upper 7 percent of the nation rose by 28 percent, while the net worth of the other 93 percent of the population declined.

Blow concludes by saying, "In his State of the Union speech in February, President Obama said that the ‘true engine of America's economic growth is a rising, thriving middle class.' It certainly looks as if that engine has stalled."

Maybe I'm missing something, but it's clear to me that the obvious way out of this mess is for either or both of our political parties to jettison what they have been doing and embark on a wholly new set of ideas designed to re-energize and rescue the middle class. Whichever political party does that will inherit a governing mandate for a very long time.

For very different reasons, neither party has been up to the task. Obama has proven that he's not able to successfully govern and cope with the magnitude of the problems that beset the nation. His legislative landmarks are a joke.

There was the stimulus that didn't, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that does neither, and the Financial Regulation Act that was written by Wall Street. But we're stuck with Obama because he wins by default.

The Republicans, in an act of self-destruction, have removed themselves from the national political field of play. Their race to the right and to oblivion, led by the tea party, has been genuinely bizarre — something that not even a mother could love.

What will likely prevent the Democrats from thinking boldly enough to design a strategy that will appeal to the despondent middle class is the fact that they are held hostage by the female activists, African-Americans and Hispanics who use political correctness as a club to get their way.

The Republicans are hamstrung by the religious right, the tea party and too many angry whites who believe they've got a corner on truth.

The Shadow could write the new deal for the middle class in a couple of weeks. Until he's finished, let's sequester Congress and the president in a jumbo jet on the tarmac with plenty of food and drink and only one bathroom. That'll do the trick.

The Shadow's holed up writing, but Goldman can be reached at: EmailMe