Hopefully I'm not piling on, but I'd like to add to Shawn's comments about the Half In Ten Campaign.

Both the CAP report and this campaign are pushing policy that would not only help people currently in poverty, but would help prevent folks in the middle class from slipping into it. As a result, "poverty will be cut in half." A more strategic way to say this is to call for expanding the middle class by making opportunity widely available and providing enough economic security to sustain a broadened middle class. This is how the Drum Major Institute's middleclass.org defines their issues/constituency. Basically, both CAP and DMI are talking about the same stuff, but in different terms.

DMI's frame is more effective in part because it reflects the apirational side of American political culture. This has been persistently documented. Very few people identify as poor. Rather, low-income folks see themselves as making their way to the middle class. People on the edge of poverty see themselves as moving toward stability. Nobody likes being called poor, as Shawn said. Plus, everybody supports the idea of helping people move up. More than 85 percent of the public thinks society should make sure "everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed." That language could be something you'd want to lead with, but what do I know?

Security is also an effective frame. People who've already made it to the middle class value security- health security, job security, child care security, etc. Clearly policies in the CAP proposal would achieve these goals. Yet it's not highlighted and nothing really articulates how folks in the middle class would benefit. On the website, we see pictures of sad-eyed children, not abandoned factories.

And I'd echo what Shawn said about the ONE campaign's inclusion of the "we're all in this together" thought. A campaign like this has to make an argument about whose role it is to address the problem. Is it the individual's or society's problem? Government or charity to the rescue? I think the language of interdependence and solidarity make an effective argument for a strong governmental role, so there's definitely a viable option to use. But there's little mention of it, and I'm afraid that people will default to thinking that addressing poverty is a matter of individual responsibility.

Which brings us to the core question: who is this campaign supposed to inspire and persuade? Because it's not low-income folks who're trying to get to the middle class. And it's not folks who're losing their foothold in the middle class.

The sad irony here is that the policy proposed is politically savvy. It bridges class divides that for so long have stymied progress. And now is exactly the right time for a proposal like this, just when everyone's feeling like the American dream is slipping away. But its ideology and language do not address today's political moment or American culture, and as a result we may miss a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Earlier this week, the Center for American Progress Action Fund, ACORN, the Coalition on Human Needs, and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights kicked off the political arm of a campaign to expand the middle class by nearly 20 million people over the next decade.

Well, kind of: instead of framing the campaign as an effort to expand the middle class and build a fair economy that works for all Americans, they fall back on a nostalgic (for baby boomers at least) War on Poverty frame, one that most sophisticated communications research suggests will only make their job harder.

That said, there are lots of positive things to note about the campaign. The campaign's new website notes that the campaign "will focus on the issues facing the poor and middle class in America, building an effective constituency to advocate for specific policy changes." The part about focusing on issues facing the middle class is a notable addition and something that was lacking from CAP's earlier report on poverty.

It's also a good sign that John Edwards is chairing the campaign. Edwards could bring the kind of partisan and populist voice to this work that has been lacking on the national level. As Larry Bartels' new book suggests, advancing the cause of economic justice in the next decade will require a Democrat in the White House and more partisanship rather than less.

Edwards should help ensure that the campaign doesn't become a kind of mushy attempt to find "common ground" between Republicans and Democrats on economic justice. The reality is that there really isn't any common ground on economic justice right now or in the near future at the national level given the conservative extremism of the national Republican party and their allies. (I say this as a matter of fact rather than advocacy—there are thoughtful efforts by progressive R's to change this, but it's a decades-long project, not a short-term one). The biggest challenge for the CAP campaign isn't finding common ground between Republicans and Democrats, it's making sure that conservative Democrats don't obstruct efforts to expand the middle class (which is one of the reasons, by the way, that this campaign needs to be framed as a campaign to expand the middle class).

I'm considerably less positive (ok, I'm negative) about much of the communcations aspect of the campaign. The name of the campaign "Half in Ten: From Poverty to Prosperity" leaves a whole lot to be desired even setting aside the problems with the poverty frame the campaign is using. Half in Ten is simply short hand for a technocratic goal, rather than a statement that combines vision and values. This can be demonstrated by comparing it with ONE: The Campaign to Make [Global] Poverty History and Green for All's goal to "build an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty.

ONE is both a values statement (we're in this together, "united as ONE") and a true vision statement ("make poverty history"). Similarly, Green for All's goal combines vision and values—a strong and inclusive economy—in a slogan that clearly positions poverty as an economic issue. By contrast, "Half in Ten" has no values content and basically translates to "give us half a loaf in 10 years." This may be fine as a compromise governmental goal adopted by political leaders (as it was in the UK), but is less than inspiring as an advocacy slogan. I wish the wealthy backers of estate tax repeal had rallied under the banner of reducing the estate tax by 50 percent in 10 years, but unfortunately they went for the whole loaf and were much more successful as a result.¹

The iconography of the campaign's website is spectacularly inept. The banner of the site rotates a set of photographs that appear to be: a black child, a white mother hugging a child, an elderly white woman in a wheelchair, a black man, and a black woman (the classroom setting suggests that she may be an immigrant). None of the pictures portray people who are clearly at work or in work clothes. Is the strategy to reinforce popular stereotypes and misconceptions about people living below the poverty line?

A final point that involves framing in a deeper sense: while it's positive that the campaign "will focus on the issues facing the poor and middle class in America, building an effective constituency to advocate for specific policy changes", they need to go one step further and describe the cross-class constituency they're trying to build as "the working class and middle class." Where I grew up in the tundra of rural Minnesota, there were plenty of people living below the poverty line, but if you called one of them a "poor person" you would probably get either a punch in the face or an insulted glare. The same goes for the hundreds of clients I represented as a legal services attorney in west central Minnesota. Most people with incomes under even the miserly federal poverty line describe themselves as working class or middle class rather than "poor," so why continue to use a term that has about as much resonance with the people it is supposed to describe as Negro or pauper did when those terms were left to the ash bin of history?

We seek change and see it, say the yellow bells of Iowa.
Not too fast, stay, we ask, cried the sirens of New Hampshire.
Ding dong ding dong, sang the indecisive bells on Tuesday.
Change be our song now, rang out the next ten bells.
Even we stand ready, punctuated the Potomac.
Then a slip of the lip amid the hip, bitter-sweet drip-drip...
And god-dang clang, the pastor sang.
Yes, we cling, confirmed the suffering bells of PA.
But we long since overcame, claimed the belles of Carolina.
Now we await the lady for to sing.
Ring out the old, ring in the new, tho perhaps not until June.

A fantastic new paper from CEPR's John Schmitt on how unions boost the wages of low wage-workers:

Economic data have long demonstrated a substantial wage premium for unionized workers --on the order of 10 to 20 percent-- relative to non-union workers with similar characteristics. This paper uses a straightforward extension of standard statistical techniques to estimate the impact of unionization separately for workers at different wage levels, from the lowest to the highest paid workers.

Using national data for 2003 through 2007, we estimate that unionization raises the wages of the typical low-wage worker (one in the 10th percentile) by 20.6 percent, compared to 13.7 percent for the typical worker (one in the 50th percentile), and 6.1 percent for the typical high-wage worker (one in the 90th percentile). The traditional statistical approach applied to the same data produces an estimate of the average union wage premium of 11.9 percent, which is substantially lower than the union effect on low-wage workers (20.6 percent) and somewhat below the effect for the median- wage worker (13.7 percent).

Also worth noting, the report includes state-by-state data on union wage premium.

Responding to a recent comment by Libertarian Finlander, I noted that I didn't necessarily have any theoretical objections to a national value-added tax, but that I wanted universal health care first. After writing my response, I ran across this interesting post by TPC's Howard Gleckman on some recent proposals to combine a VAT with health care reform:

... Ezekial Emanuel and Victor Fuchs ... [would] create a European-style Value Added Tax and use the huge slug of new revenue for health care vouchers, which people would use to help buy insurance.

My TPC colleague Len Burman, who comes at the problem from the perspective of tax reform as well as health care reform, would go yet another step. He’d create a VAT of about 15 percent to fund these health vouchers. But Burman would also use the VAT revenue to reform and simplify the income tax.

He’d set two individual rates—say, 15 percent and 25 percent—and eliminate the personal exemption, the standard deduction, and most itemized deductions. He’d also dump the exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance and vastly simplify retirement savings incentives.

Burman’s VAT would not only help pay for private insurance, it would also finance Medicaid, veterans health, and the share of Medicare that is now supported through general revenues (about $200 billion in 2009).

Burman is hardly the first policy maven to push the VAT. Yale professor Michael Graetz backs one of roughly 10 percent to 14 percent. However, Graetz would use the VAT revenue to eliminate the income tax for nearly all taxpayers—those earning less than, say $100,000. The TPC’s Bill Gale has also suggested a VAT, but as an additional source of revenue rather than as a replacement for the income tax.

These proposals are all worth a look, but a U.S. shift to a VAT is a much longer-term proposition than (hopefully) health care reform that gets costs under control and expands coverage to all Americans.

Jonathan Cohn's article in the American Prospect is the best reporting on health care costs and the federal budget I think I've seen. This is probably the most important part, but the whole thing is worth a thorough read.

Historically, Medicare, like private insurers, has rewarded doctors and hospitals for performing more procedures. (While the payment reforms of the 1980s, so called "diagnosis related groups," helped mitigate that problem, they didn't eliminate it.) But patients don't actually seem to be better off for the extra attention. The proof of this lies in the now-famous work of John Wenn-berg and his colleagues at Dartmouth Medical School. As they and their disciples have repeatedly demonstrated, Medicare currently underwrites vastly different levels of care in different parts of the country. Seniors in South Florida, for example, get a lot more medical care than seniors in Minneapolis -- apparently because South Florida has a great many more doctors (who often overtreat their patients). But statistically, South Florida seniors don't seem better off for the extra care. That means Medicare must be paying for a lot of unnecessary or counterproductive treatments.

That's why reducing unnecessary care (as opposed to simply reducing care, which is what crude increases in cost-sharing would do) is the first key to Medicare's financial survival -- and the efficiency of the health system generally. Medicare could, for example, offer financial incentives to providers that follow established best practices. Medicare could also reward those that make information about its practices and outcomes publicly available. The incentives to do this can be positive, in the form of bonuses, or negative, in the form of penalties. Medicare might also encourage seniors to enroll in integrated practice settings, like the highly regarded Group Health of Puget Sound, which have been shown time and again to offer some of the most cost-effective -- and, by most measures, the best -- medical care available. This is not the same as simply herding seniors into loosely organized managed care systems, only some of which actually integrate care and emphasize prevention the way places like Group Health do.

The New Republic's John Judis has an instructive piece on race in American politics today. This part about how Obama can overcome racial resentment has some bearing on the poverty and inequality debate.

Can Obama surmount these obstacles? If the strong version of Mendelberg's thesis is correct, then the very fact that Obama is African American will undercut any appeals to racial fears or resentments. And, if elections were held in the manner of the Iowa caucus, where voters publicly debate their positions and where Obama won substantial white working class support, then Mendelberg's stronger thesis might well prove true. But elections are held in the privacy of a voting booth, where a voter can give voice to fears and resentments without danger of being heard. Obama may be able to sway some white voters to his side by drawing attention to race, but probably not enough to fully compensate for the disadvantage he faces.

If addressing racial resentments directly is not the answer, what is? As Mendelberg also suggests, it's changing the subject--doing what the Republicans of the 1870s and the Democrats of the 1990s did. This year, that means diverting voters' attention from the politics of race to the plight of the economy and the continuing quagmire in Iraq.

In the end, the lesson of political psychology for Democrats is not to avoid nominating black candidates. It is simply to understand that America's racial history continues to influence the calculations of voters--sometimes near the forefronts of their minds, sometimes in the deep recesses of their unconscious. For liberals, acknowledging these obstacles is the first step to blunting them.

Similarly, just having the discussion about "the poor" and what their obligations are is a minefield. Like clockwork the conversation turns to how to motivate poor people to become less dependent. Government programs are put on defense. Why? The reality is, a huge population believes in the racist and individualistic idea that the poor are shiftless, and there are limits to the utility of calling out racism and selfishness for what it is. Changing the subject to the economy, opportunity and security for all, and/or national solidarity are necessary and complimentary ways to go.

There are justifiable fears that those frames, however, are too narrow. Every frame should be examined for what it includes and excludes. If it excludes policy that's desired and viable, it's not worth it. But what viable policies would be excluded? Policies that are perceived as too targeted might not fit, but these are the same policies that frames being used now have failed to move on the national stage.

I would concede that the poverty frame is more inclusive behind the scenes. Targeted programs are viable if the action stays where a poverty frame may still do some good. Indeed, many targeted programs by their very nature are small enough to not require national mobiliatization and persuasion. This is where the anti-poverty world is at its best- this is what it was built to do.

Certain popular programs also don't seem to need to be reframed. SCHIP and the minimum wage, for example, can receive national attention and be extremely popular. Last year, when these policies were more or less the Democratic domestic agenda, no real attempt to reframe the debate proved necessary.

But in general, the poverty frame is far more exclusive on the national stage. Policy will not reach scale unless inequality and poverty become national issues once again. But if we bring social problems into the light of day, we have to grapple with the racial divide and American individualism- two extremely powerful ideas that militate towards retrenchment and perserving the status quo, and that the poverty frame reinforces.

Like Obama on race, we will have to change the subject so we're not talking about individualism or race. It's probably no secret that I like FDR and Obama's language the best but there are many other options.

In a previous post, I mentioned Larry Bartels' important new book, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. Bartels is blogging about the book this week on TPMCafe. In his lead-off post, he reviews some of his key findings:

1. Ordinary citizens' policy preferences are often only loosely connected to their beliefs and values. For example, upward of 85% of Americans agree that "our society should do whatever is necessary to make sure that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed," but support for specific policies that would promote equal opportunity is much more modest. One problem is that many people are too inattentive to grasp connections between values and policies. Among people with strongly egalitarian values, those who were highly informed about politics opposed the highly inegalitarian Bush tax cuts by a four- to-one margin, but those who were least informed were more likely to support the tax cuts than to oppose them.

2. Even when public preferences are clear and firmly held, policies contrary to those preferences can persist for a very long time if powerful political elites want them to persist. For example, the real value of the minimum wage has declined by more than 40% since the late 1960s despite remarkably strong and consistent public support for minimum wage increases. (This outcome has been facilitated by the fact that the nominal minimum wage is not adjusted for inflation, but that is itself a political decision; even when Democrats have controlled the White House and Congress, they have preferred symbolic nominal increases to permanent indexing of the sort that has long been accepted for social security.)

3. There are big differences in policies between Democratic and Republican elected officials, even when they represent exactly the same constituents. Political scientists have an elegant theory explaining why this shouldn't happen: if voters choose the candidate closest to their own policy positions, Democrats and Republicans alike must move to the center in order to get elected. The only problem is, they don't. A figure in the book compares the behavior of Democratic and Republican senators representing liberal and conservative states. The difference in behavior between a Democrat and a Republican representing the same constituents turns out to be much greater than the difference in behavior between a Democrat representing the most liberal state in the country and a Democrat representing the most conservative state in the country. Party and ideology dominate constituents' preferences in shaping legislators' roll call votes.

4. Insofar as elected officials are responsive to the policy views of their constituents, only the views of affluent and middle-class people really matter. The preferences of millions of low-income citizens (in the bottom third of the income distribution) have no discernible effect on senators' roll call votes, whether we consider the whole range of issues that come before Congress or specific salient roll call votes focusing on the federal budget, the minimum wage, civil rights, and abortion. Aristotle wrote that "where the possession of political power is due to the possession of economic power or wealth ... that is oligarchy, and when the unpropertied class have power, that is democracy." By that standard, America is, at best, a very unequal democracy.

Tom Schaller on the latest obstructionism by the conservative Dem bloc in the House:

... [a} story in The Hill about the obstinate-yet-conflicted House “Blue Dog” coalition is exactly the sort of problem that ought to frustrate liberals. Here you have (some) conservative Democrats who have repeatedly voted to fund a war without worrying about how to pay for it, and now all of sudden they show pangs of fiscal responsibility about not coming up with the monies to fund one program in the new war spending bill. Blue Dogs finally getting with the program: Sounds great, right?

Not so fast, because the part they are raising fiscal responsibility objectives about is…wait for it, because it’s really going to infuriate you…education benefits for veterans. Where was this sort of ethic from Blue Dogs when the Bush administration was asking for billions to be handed over to venal, wasteful, no-bid contract-winning war profiteers?

“Some of us oppose creating a new entitlement program in an emergency spending bill, whether it’s butchers, bakers or candlestick-makers,” said Rep. John Tanner (D-Tenn.), a founding member of the Blue Dog Coalition who serves on the House leadership team as a deputy whip. The so-called GI Bill of Rights, authored by Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), would give veterans money for college and cost $720 million in its first two years. But critics say that could grow to billions in future years.”

No! Not billions spent without funds to pay for it -- that just never happens in defense spending!

Two comments: First, thank goodness for Webb. Second, I’m going to keep saying this until it starts to sink in: Since Reconstruction, the Blue Dog element within the Democratic Party has gone from dominant majority, to significant minority to what it is today -- a declining coalition of conflicted complainers. Among the blessings of building a non-southern Democratic majority is that there is greater intraparty ideological cohesion, thus marginalizing Blue Dogs and their hand-wringing interference with emerging liberal project.

Robert Kuttner argues that publicly subsidized human-services jobs should be good-paying jobs with benefits:

....

Here is a very straightforward proposal. Let's have a national policy to make every human-service job a good job -- one that pays a living wage with good benefits, and includes adequate training, professional status, and the prospect of advancement -- a career rather than casual labor.

These, after all, are jobs caring for our parents, our children, and ourselves. Transforming all human-service work into good jobs would not merely replenish the supply of decent work. It would vastly improve the quality of care delivered to the elderly at home or in institutions; to young children in pre-kindergartens or day-care facilities; and to sick people whether in hospitals, hospices, outpatient settings, or their homes.

These are also the jobs that cannot be outsourced. Even if we succeed in reviving American manufacturing, the process of automation means that America is almost certain to become even more of a service economy over time. Good service-sector jobs can help replace for good factory jobs.

....

This effort would be part of two broader labor-policy shifts that America sorely needs. First, we need to reverse the trend toward casualization of labor that has been occurring for three decades. One of the great advances of the 20th century was regularization of the employment relationship. Through successful social struggle, growth of unions, and enactment of legislation, most jobs came to provide decent wages and fringe benefits. Workers could not be fired without cause. Loyalty to the firm was reciprocated. Grievance systems were created and respected. Economists termed these jobs primary labor-market jobs. Casual, secondary labor-market jobs, which paid less and offered no such guarantees, continued to exist, but they were the exception. In recent years, however, the shift to casual jobs has become the norm, and in low-paid human-service work, casual, high-turnover jobs are the industry standard.

Second, the upgrading of human-service work would reverse another insidious trend -- the employer's habit of trying to increase the efficiency of labor by fragmenting jobs into separate tasks and paying the lowest possible wage for each task -- a strategy known as Taylorism, after the early 20th-century "efficiency expert," Fredrick Winslow Taylor, who first recommended it.

....

Larry Bartels' new book, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, is full of fascinating insights into the politics of inequality. I hope to do a longer post on the book at some point, but until then, wanted to share one of Bartels' conclusions:

Scholars of political participation and liberal activists often seem to suppose that the cure for political inequality is to educate and mobilize the disadvantaged in support of specific progressive policies. However, the evidence of unresponsiveness to the views of low-income citizens presented in chapter 9 [of Bartel's book] and in [Martin] Gilen's work suggests that that strategy is very unlikely to be politically effective. ....

If "voice" is "likely to be futile" for people on the losing end of economic inequality, is there any hope for progress? My analysis points to two related bright spots in an otherwise gloomy picture. First, the correlation between class positions and political views is not so substantial that support for egalitarian policies is limited to "those mired in poverty." ....

[Second], my analyses suggest that the specific policy views of citizens, whether rich or poor, have less impact in the policy-making process than the ideological convictions of elected officials. .... policy choices seem to depend more on the partisan ideologies of key policy makers than on the details of public opinion. Thus, even if poor people have negligible direct influence on the day-to-day decisions of elected officials, they--and their ideological allies--may have substantial indirect influence by altering the balance of power between Democrats and Republicans in the making of public policy.

In essence, reducing poverty and inequality will require more progressives in positions of power. Yet, modern-day anti-poverty advocacy is largely legislative advocacy, advocacy conducted by groups funded by non-partisan and mostly non-ideological foundations. As political scientist Andrew Rich has noted:

... the leaders of liberal think tanks are often preoccupied by deeply held commitments to producing objective research, on the one hand, and to connecting their work to issue-based grassroots activism, on the other hand. These commitments are compatible with the tenets of liberal ideology, but they are far less helpful to fighting a war of ideas.

This dominant liberal approach has met with limited success over the last few decades. Bartels' research helps to explain why.

From RAND, a new working paper finds that divorce might not so bad on kids after all.

Social scientists and commentators disagree on how much of the association between parental divorce and child well-being is causal. This paper reexamines the claim that parental divorce is detrimental to children’s emotional well-being, measured in terms of behavior problems. The author analyzed panel data from the 1986-2002 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979, and found that parental divorce is associated with a higher level of behavior problems in children. However, after controlling for unobserved factors that are either constant over time or change at a constant rate over time, the effect of parents’ divorce substantially declines and its influence on their children’s emotional well-being is not statistically significant.

Via the Sloan Work and Family Research Network Blog.

An underreported finding from last Friday's jobs data is that people are increasingly being forced to take part time jobs. The numbers here already exceed their highest levels in the last recession. This chart, from a newly updated CLASP report on how the downturn is affecting low-income folks, shows what's going on.

See this NYT article for more on the people behind the numbers.

Kevin Carey at the Quick and the Ed and the Prospect's Ezra Klein seem to be talking past each other on education reform. I thought I'd try to clear things up a bit.

Here's Klein:

It would be good if we could really nail down what works in education. But my conclusion, increasingly, is that the best thing you could do for poor kids' educational prospects is increase their parents' economic prospects...Education reform is a piece of the war on poverty, but it isn't, by itself, a winning strategy.

And here's Carey:

So I'm just not sure who the other side of this debate about the all-encompassing power of education reform is supposed to be. The Prospect has published some persuasive arguments that education was over-valued during the 1990s as an economic curative by the likes of Robert Reich and many economists. But the value of education generally is distinct from the need for systemic educational improvement, particularly when some flaws in the public school system are so glaring. And it's not like Reich's overly narrow view of the needs of modern workers caused him to lead the war against the war on poverty. There are bad people in charge of that, and they've got plenty of other reasons to do so.

It seems like some progressives see the possibilities of educational improvement as a barrier to more comprehensive reforms, a mirage that distracts from the real journey. Are any other sustained, large-scale efforts to improve the lives of poor children regarded this way?

Klein's most likely referring to the innumerable conservatives who push education reform as the sole corrective to poverty and inequality and then do little about it. To conservatives, education reform is almost tantamount to picking yourself up by your bootstraps. When they bring it up, they more or less mean, "education is what you poor people need- so get off your duff and get one!"

Even centrists use education reform against liberals. To be sure, they differ from conservatives because actually do something about it. Still, they propose it as a substitute for more ambitious intervention in the economy, rather than as part of a package that could reduce poverty and inequality. Once again, liberal solutions get pushed off the table by education reform.

So while Carey knows about these "bad people," he doesn't seem to see that that's what liberals are responding to. That's probably not to his or his constituents' benefit. I wonder if more people like Carey took on bad-faith conservative arguments and denounced centrists who marginalize their allies' causes, education reform would make liberals much less jumpy.

A great part of Obama's speech last night:

The people I’ve met in small towns and big cities across this country understand that government can’t solve all our problems – and we don’t expect it to. We believe in hard work. We believe in personal responsibility and self-reliance.

But we also believe that we have a larger responsibility to one another as Americans – that America is a place – that America is the place – where you can make it if you try. That no matter how much money you start with or where you come from or who your parents are, opportunity is yours if you’re willing to reach for it and work for it. It’s the idea that while there are few guarantees in life, you should be able to count on a job that pays the bills; health care for when you need it; a pension for when you retire; an education for your children that will allow them to fulfill their God-given potential. That’s the America we believe in. That’s the America I know.

This is not altogether different from the rationale behind the New Deal, the philosophy of shared responsibility that gave us the Golden Age of shared prosperity (albeit shared mostly among white men). FDR (with apologies to regular readers who may have seen me highlight this quote too many times already):

In every land there are always at work forces that drive men apart and forces that draw men together. In our personal ambitions we are individualists. But in our seeking for economic and political progress as a nation, we all go up, or else we all go down, as one people.

This is also a break from the recent past. Clinton conditioned public action on whether people "worked hard and played by the rules." So progressives had to prove that people were doing that. The best we seemed to do was enact social policy that motivates people to "work hard." But these times call for much more ambition.

This frame could serve a progressive agenda well, I think. The central question it raises is not what "they" are doing to fulfill their end of the social bargain, but what "we" are doing for our part. Is our nation ensuring that "no matter how much money you start with or where you come from or who your parents are, opportunity is yours"? Is there a basic level of security for all Americans? This is the debate that we need to have about poverty and inequality. We can talk about "opportunity" and "security" all we like but unless the questions are about what we are doing, I don't think we'll have the conversations we want.

Moreover, this vision is rooted in a belief in national solidarity and fraternity. People who work to undermine our common bonds, in our politics and in the economy, don't share this belief. That's why this part of the speech was unsettling.

I trust the American people to realize that while we don’t need big government, we do need a government that stands up for families who are being tricked out of their homes by Wall Street predators; a government that stands up for the middle-class by giving them a tax break; a government that ensures that no American will ever lose their life savings just because their child gets sick. Security and opportunity; compassion and prosperity aren’t liberal values or conservative values – they’re American values.

Leaving aside the questionable and unnecessary attack on "big government." On the one hand it's probably smart to connect these values with the American creed, but couldn't he have just said that these are both liberal and American values? That progressive values are American values? As it is, he's implying that conservatives share these values. And they don't. Many of them don't believe that Americans are brothers and sisters. They hate liberals, resent minorities, and flout their responsibility to the public. Those don't sound like American values to me.