The ragin’ Cajun and his more mellow fellow pollster and strategist have teamed up again 20 years after working together on Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. This time, it’s all about the middle class (stupid!)
They begin with a blunt admission: ‘We are writing this book because we have failed and that’s not good enough.’ In fact, though, it is more of an accusation – James Carville and Stan Greenberg are not really beating themselves up for letting down the middle class, but are instead asking George W Bush, Paul Ryan (in his capacity as House budget committee chair) and, yes, even Barack Obama himself, to take one on the chin.
There is good reason for this. Facts, figures and focus group quotes tumble from every page. The American middle class is hurting badly. They work longer and longer hours and are taking on more debt. They have meagre pension provision and scarily high health and education costs. Families struggle to hold on to what they have and no longer dare to dream of their kids doing better than themselves. All depressingly familiar territory to the UK’s own ‘squeezed middle’.
But there is a fudge at the heart of the book. ‘Middle class’ is used to mean everyone except the very, very wealthy. The authors’ focus is on lambasting the success of this tiny group despite their own focus groups’ clear advice that middle-class voters are unmoved by statistics like ‘the wealthiest one per cent of American families own as much as the bottom 90 per cent’ or ‘on average CEOs now earn 531 times the pay of average hourly workers’.
The book, curiously drafted as alternating narratives in each author’s voice with occasional ‘shared’ sections, sometimes reads like the transcript of a high-level Georgetown debate and many of its proposals (such as ‘require broadcasters to discount campaign ads’) will resonate more inside the Washington beltway than middle America. Despite specially commissioned polling, Carville and Greenberg fail to really get under the skin of the 59 per cent who define themselves as middle class.
Yet the authors’ passion is genuine enough, as is their desire to move the middle classes centre-stage. How Obama and his team react will be interesting to watch out for in the US, where, just as here in the UK, it is middle-class voters who hold the key to electoral success.
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Deborah Mattinson is director of BritainThinks and a former pollster for the Labour party
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It’s the Middle Class, Stupid!
James Carville and Stan Greenberg
Blue Rider Press | 336pp | £17.23
Yes, Deborah, and one might observe that the US phrase “middle class” used to mean “established working class” in British English. Given the failure of US trade unionism to extend beyond a few exceptional sectors (eg NY textile organisation benefited from ethnic and European tradtions to a quite exceptional extent, as well as understandable outrage at the dreadful Triangle factory fire), though mining disasters never seemed ot attract a similar re’clame…), the once-familiar phrase “organized working class” does not carry the same demographic or political weight… A very very foreign country, more alien to British experience than France or Germany, or indeed many others…Since the contemptible Kennedy-, and the either more contemptible Clinton- and Obama/Sotero cults, the British political class, especially its leftish sector, has been happier thinking about the lure of the ‘city’within the Beltway than about the people of Britain…