E.J. Dionne on Democractic Presidential Canidates and the Working Class

Do read A Demographic the Democrats Can't Forget even if it looks like I am gutting the article here:

But the long term is another matter. To build a majority this fall and make history, both candidates would need a lot of help from a group with its own reasons to be discontented: the white working class.

"Working class" seems an antique term, but the people it describes still exist, more now in the service industries than in manufacturing. Demographers often use education levels as a surrogate for class position, and the past three decades have not been kind to Americans who are not college graduates.

For white male high school grads, average wages stood at $18.44 an hour (in constant 2006 dollars) in 1979. They dropped to $16.06 an hour in 1995. There was then a brief upturn -- wages for such men hit $17.49 in 2002 -- but by 2006, their hourly earnings had fallen to $17.31. White female high school graduates have gained ground, but their wages have recently stagnated too. In 1979, such women earned $11.75 an hour. Their wages peaked at $13.42 in 2003, but dropped to $13.08 in 2006. Similar patterns, at somewhat higher wage levels, are visible over the years for men and women who attended college but didn't graduate.

Family incomes fared a bit better than these numbers would suggest, but for a reason. "To the extent that white working-class incomes went up, it was because women were working more weeks per year and more hours per week," said Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute who helped me assemble all of these figures.

The need to boost household incomes through more work by both men and women adds stress on families whose breadwinners enjoy little job flexibility. When Bernstein spoke with me yesterday, he was working at home, anticipating that he might have to pick his children up from school early because of a snowstorm. It's not a freedom all workers have. "If I were a cashier at a department store, I probably couldn't do that," he said.

Both Clinton and Obama know all this. So does John Edwards, who deserves credit for pushing his competitors to address class issues and whose policies -- and "son of a millworker" speeches -- are aimed directly at working-class voters.

Take a look at those figures about income. They evidence something I have felt for many years now. And weren't the Bush tax cuts supposed to make us all more prosperous?