Her listeners have to wonder exactly what she has in mind by “regular folks” when Mrs. Obama says that after completing their Ivy League undergraduate and graduate educations, she and her husband “found ourselves in a position like most young couples, with our PhDs and JDs and MPHs and LMNOPs, all those wonderful degrees, all mired in debt. We had not paid off our loan debt until just a few years ago.” But whether you are highly educated multi-millionaires or not, in Michelle Obama’s America, chances are you’re afraid, isolated, and hopeless.
Her husband, of course, manages a peppier and more upbeat stump speech, but in fact the same dark view of American life permeates his rhetoric too. Both Obamas seem to think the country is deeply depressed, and in need of a spiritual, economic, and political savior.
This view of America has been a real problem for the Left in the Bush years. As the liberal labor economist Stephen Rose has put it, “What progressives generally say about the economy is unrelentingly pessimistic — stagnant wages, rising costs, overwhelming burdens of debt. It’s a message that doesn’t resonate with the middle class — not only because it’s overly negative (by itself political poison), but because it’s simply flat out wrong.”
This gospel of bitterness arises from one analysis of what is unquestionably an anxious middle class, and one that believes the nation’s politics is on the wrong track. But anxiety is not necessarily a sign of desperation and injustice. Aspiration, too, can leave families anxious, as they strive to reach high aims with no guarantees. A political message that speaks to the aspirations of American families, rather than imagining that America is on the brink of suicide, would be a welcome and quite possibly a winning message in this election year.
It would seek to offer help to families facing uncertainties on the path of upward mobility, and would offer to fix some of the institutional failings that might create avoidable anxieties in a changing world, but would not describe the striving of America’s lower middle class as tale of failure and anguish. It would offer a reform agenda aimed at fusing American ambition with the energies of the market, rather than a cathartic transformation aimed at a return to an imaginary past.
The candidate of hope, it seems, draws much of his energy from a sense that America is hopeless; and the progressive in the race yearns for the America of his childhood. Let’s hope his opponent can do better.
— Yuval Levin is the Hertog fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and senior editor of The New Atlantis magazine. < Back 1 2 
