Jeffrey Birnbaum and Chris Cillizza say in this morning’s Washington Post that the Soccer Moms or Security Moms that every politician tried to woo in past elections have been replaced by the Mortgage Moms. These are the women who understand the squeeze on middle class families’ rising costs for housing, health insurance and childcare that can’t be covered by stagnant wages. And these are the moms who will vote for someone who connects on those issues.
If Birnbaum and Cillizza are right, then the debate over on the Democratic Strategist is critical. That’s where Kim, Solomon and Kessler are arguing that Democrats should give the family economic news an optimistic spin so they will sound, uh, optimistic and thus appeal to the masses of Mortgage Moms. By comparison, folks like me who talk about the pressures on the middle class sound like the love-child of Casandra and Eeyore.
In my role as academic-geek, I should probably stay out of this particular debate and leave the politics to my more subtle friends. But I can’t help making one not-very-politically-calculated point: The US has followed a constellation of policies since the mid-1970s that have chipped away at the strength of the middle class health care policies, failing public schools, deregulated credit, access to college, etc. What has gone wrong calls to account leaders of both parties. The problems facing the middle class aren’t an exclusively-Bush thing, although the hammering on the middle class has certainly picked up speed in the past five years or so. There are problems, and they came long in the making. Everyone needs to face that head-on.
I’m all for reaching out to the Mortgage Moms. But anyone who wants to paint a happy-face on where the middle class stands today probably isn’t staring down a 2/28 adjustable rate mortgage or facing a credit card that just escalated to 29% because the water bill was paid late.
It’s tough out there, and it is getting tougher. Understanding that — really getting where the problems are — is the first step in offering solutions that mean something. It isn’t just Eeyore’s first-born who sees that.
