You will never make it

Barack Obama keeps repeating a line that didn’t work for Al Gore and is only half working for him now: Mc Cain’s tax cuts is for the five or ten percent of wealthiest Americans, while his tax cut is directed to the large (although shrinking) middle class. (Also known as "the rest of America", homless excluded).
The reason why the message wasn't sucessful in the past and is half working now, is that many Americans don't like to think of themselves as this "vague" middle class that struggles to make ends meet. They rather prefer to think that they will make it.

If we consider the statistical side of the expression "middle class", we can see that the concept itself is an illusion and that Democrats has little to win by invoking it. According to the census bureau, the average household income in America was 50.233 dollars in the year 2007. In actual percentage, around 25% of American families actually live with that income. These people pay little taxes and no tax break can help them. A tax break can only be significant for those making above 100k, a 32% of households in 2005, of which 60% is solidly Republican.

But statistics are not the real reason why the Democratic message takes so long to sink. The real reason lies, of course, at an imaginary level. Anybody who grew up watching American television knows that outside the world of "The Wire," all American policemen live in five bedrooms houses with hard wood floors and spectacular views of the Golden Bridge or the New York skyline. The so-called middle class, and more importantly the actual middle class, had bought a fairy tale that tells them that, somewhat, they will climb the ladder of social rank to the very top. They can make it to the million dollars! Why not? Mark Cuban did it and Mark Cuban is one of us. This lovely trait of American hyper-rich people of looking like normal people is transformed in the minds of middle class America into the mirage that since Mark Cuban uses the same trashy t-shirts I use, I can become ultra-rich as he his. It is on this fantasy that Republicans prey election after election.

A strategic fight for political hegemony in the US should include this harsh, direct message: NO. You will not make it. You will never make it. Never, ever, ever. The odds of you making it are as good as your odds of walking from a Vegas casino with 100k in your pocket. This simple existential awakening should have definitive social and political consequences. People may stop ignoring their actual lifes in favor of a life they will never enjoy. They may even actually measure themselves by something else than their bank accounts, how much money they will leave to their children and how they are going to pay for their own funeral. And I am convinced that politics gets much better when people like their lives. The whole system of expectations changes when the postman and the teacher, the employee and the lawyer, demand to be happy on the bases of what they actually are and not on the bases of what they will never become.