Robert Kuttner: Class Should Be Working to Kerry's Advantage

SOCIAL CLASS is one of the most explosive issues in American politics. Like any explosive, it can dramatically transform a landscape -- or blow up in the user's face.

There are far more ordinary wage-earning people than wealthy investors and corporate moguls, but the political right has done far better at using class solidarity to its advantage than the liberal left. Americans like to view their country as a wide-open land of opportunity. Most consider themselves middle class, and most are uneasy thinking in terms of class at all. It's the rich who understand and act on class interests.

The Bush presidency has intensified a trend that began under Ronald Reagan -- widening inequality that benefited those at the very top. This shift has been carried out not just through tax policy but through cuts in social outlays and changes in regulations that made it easier for chief executives and other financial insiders to enrich themselves at the expense of ordinary workers and small investors and harder for ordinary people to afford decent schools, houses, and health care. This is surely class warfare, but it is one-way.

Under Bush, the pay of ordinary workers has lagged behind inflation. About 77 percent of all the dollars in tax cuts went to the richest 20 percent of households. More workers have lost health insurance and pension coverage. These policy changes did not just happen; they were worked out in concert with organized business.

You would think, therefore, that the Democrats would make Republican responsibility for these skewed benefits and costs the centerpiece of the 2004 campaign. But that enterprise is trickier than it might seem. Since all but the most destitute of voters consider themselves middle class, a politics that talks about haves and have-nots starts sounding like a politics of handouts.

While John Edwards bravely speaks of two Americas, John Kerry constantly invokes"the middle class." It's not that Kerry opposes programs that benefit the poor; it's that polls consistently show that if you emphasize the poor you run smack into the fact that most Americans consider themselves middle class.

Even though individual voters may resent the fact that jobs are moving to India or that schools are lacking necessary funds or that health care benefits are evaporating, this is not a country where most voters resent the rich as a class. It's a land where nearly everyone would like to be rich....