Whenever I hear American politicians (especially Democrats) talk about "the middle class," I'm always a bit confused about who's included in that term. In the UK, the term is almost always contrasted and compared with "the upper class" and "the lower class" (or "the working class").
In the U.S., it seems a much vaguer term, meaning whatever the Dems want it to mean. As far as I can gather, from Clinton (times 2) to Harris, whoever the Democrats are reaching out to, that's supposed to be the middle class. Does that include blue-collar workers? Maybe. People in the food industry? Perhaps. High school graduates with no higher education? Who knows?
Yesterday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gave a speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention that multiple media outlets described as a "barnburner." Funny how they all used that same word (although they disagreed on whether it needed to be hyphenated, written as one word, or have a space in between).
The New York Times portrayed it as a turning point for AOC, moving her away from her "leftist" past and into the heart of the Democratic establishment. Maybe the party is hoping that this would be her equivalent of the "Obama at the 2004 DNC" moment.
The attached clip, which I screencapped (and edited to remove the boring bits) today, shows what's interesting about this.
- First you see my browser showing a Google results page with a link to a NYT article about the speech. Underneath the link, you can see that it shows a small fragment from the article: 'Cortez gave a forceful endorsement of Kamala Harris, saying Ms. Harris was "for the working class, because she's from the working class."'
- I then click the article link and search in it for the words "working class." Strangely, the words are not found in the article.
- I then go to the YouTube video of AOC's speech, and jump to where she says, "In Kamala Harris, we have a chance to elect a president who is for the middle class. Because she is from the middle class."
Here's what I think happened.
- Ahead of the Convention, the Democratic Party kindly provided the New York Times with a draft copy of the speech, and maybe strongly hinted that portraying AOC as the wayward socialist sheep who had finally joined the flock of the gentle liberals would make for a nice angle on the news story. Whether NYT already decided up front that it was going to be a "barnburner" is something I leave up to you to decide.
- Next, some sharp-eyed campaign operative spotted the words "working class" in the text, was overcome by visions of hammers and sickles marching to the tune of the "Internationale," fell onto the fainting couch, was quickly revived with a few drops of cognac, and then edited the speech to remove the offending term.
Not to mention that "she is from the working class" is kind of a strange thing to say about the daughter of a UC Berkeley biologist doing breast cancer research (mom) and the first Black scholar to hold tenure at the Dept. of Economics at Stanford (dad).
- The New York Times were given season tickets to the Yankees for editing the sentence out of their copy, but unfortunately Google beat them to the punch and kept it in its cache long enough for me to spot it.
Politics is compromise, but usually you don't see this clearly how the sausage is made.
