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American democracy in the past has always been known for its large middle class and its relatively few very wealthy people and very few very poor people, but that is gone to today and the middle class is shrinking.

Real Democrats don't abandon the middle class.

The middle class has just fallen further and further behind the rich.

We are not going back to the failed policies of the past. We are fighting for the middle class!

The middle class has disappeared. We have a highway to poverty and no roads coming out.

We don't want to go back to the same policies and the same practices that drove our economy into a ditch, that punished the middle class, and that led us to this catastrophe. We have to keep moving forward.

The 1970s - I was ten in 1975 - were a bad decade in all sorts of ways but the middle class had comfortable assumptions about the prospects for its children. The middle class was smaller then; it was a much less competitive Britain, less meritocratic.

We can move America forward with a strong middle class. We can move America forward with a strong Democratic majority in the Senate. And together we can move America forward with Barack Obama in the White House.

Prior to 1940, the affluent and the middle class began to converge, but after 1979, the economic gap between the middle class and affluent widened significantly.

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers.