Voters Won’t Buy Obama’s New Inequality

"What's happened to the American deal that says, you know, we are focused on building a strong middle class? That is not a left or right position. That is an American position."


And the question is going to be, in this election, whether or not we are able to reclaim that vital center of American thought and American values that says, 'We're all in this together' and, you know, it matters if we are building a broad-based middle class, where everybody is able to do their part and everybody's able to succeed.
I couldn't agree more. In fact, that's practically been the theme song of this site for the last few years. We've long argued that concerns about the middle class, economic disparity, upward mobility, empathy, and a common purpose shouldn't be seen as prerogatives of the left -- and that framing them as such is often a way of marginalizing them. So it's great to see President Obama attempt to change the tenor of the debate by refusing to see those values as either left or right.


But what, if the president wins a second term, does he plan to do to "reclaim that vital center"? The advantage to being the challenger is that the country gives you the benefit of the doubt while the incumbent's rhetoric has a scorecard to be judged against.


There’s no need for Republicans to be defensive about this subject. Although inequality has long been a major concern of liberals, most voters don’t seem to share it.
When the National Opinion Research Center asked people whether they believed the government has a responsibility “to reduce the differences in income between people with high incomes and those with low incomes,” in 2008, only 37 percent agreed. Forty-three percent disagreed, and 20 percent had no opinion. When pollsters ask people to name the top issue facing the country, almost nobody volunteers inequality, notes Karlyn Bowman, an opinion-research analyst at the American Enterprise Institute. “I’ve literally never seen it cross the 1 percent threshold,” she says.
But if voters don’t especially care about how much money the rich are making, they do care about how much they themselves are making. A return to robust economic growth and rising middle-income wages doesn’t require reversing a decades-long trend toward higher inequality. It requires improvements to our monetary, tax and health-care policies.
Instead of talking about inequality -- even to rebut Obama’s dubious claims -- Republicans should talk about what voters care about, while pointing out that the president would rather chase ideological will-o’-the-wisps.