I realize that makes him evil in your eyes…but at what point do Obama crazies stop demonizing those who support Hillary? If that’s what you want to read, there’s plenty over at dailykos.com

The chart of which you speak is about the divergence of the middle class income to the top 10% and the Internet boom created some insanely wealthy people who were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time.

The middle class did reasonably well during the 90’s - especially considering the disaster of Reagan’s tax code changes in the 80’s, the Bush 41 slump that Bill inherited and obviously the last 7.33 years under GWB.

But if you feel it worthwhile to bash the only Democrat that actually was elected since 1976…if it makes you feel good…go for it. I mean, he was such a disaster that he actually won twice.

” Since the late 1970s the America I knew has unraveled. We’re no longer a middle-class society, in which the benefits of economic growth are widely shared: between 1979 and 2005 the real income of the median household rose only 13 percent, but the income of the richest 0.1% of Americans rose 296 percent.

Most people assume that this rise in inequality was the result of impersonal forces, like technological change and globalization. But the great reduction of inequality that created middle-class America between 1935 and 1945 was driven by political change; I believe that politics has also played an important role in rising inequality since the 1970s”

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/introducing-this-blog/

Bartels’ paper is worth reading and really does make Franks look like Alvin Toffler–it sounds true, but it isn’t. To quote the summary of Bartels’ first analysis of the statistics on voting patterns, class and stated positions on social, economic and political issues that Franks did not bother to look at

• Has the white working class abandoned the Democratic Party? No. White voters in the bottom third of the income distribution have actually become more reliably Democratic in presidential elections over the past half-century, while middle- and upper-income white voters have trended Republican. Low-income whites have become less Democratic in their partisan identifications, but at a slower rate than more affluent whites – and that trend is entirely confined to the South, where Democratic identification was artificially inflated by the one-party system of the Jim Crow era.

• Has the white working class become more conservative? No. The average views of low-income whites have remained virtually unchanged over the past 30 years. (A pro-choice shift on abortion in the 1970s and ‘80s has been partially reversed since the early 1990s.) Their positions relative to more affluent white voters – generally less liberal on social issues and less conservative on economic issues – have also remained virtually unchanged.

• Do working class “moral values” trump economics? No. Social issues (including abortion) are less strongly related to party identification and presidential votes than economic issues are, and that is even more true for whites in the bottom third of the income distribution than for more affluent whites. Moreover, while social issue preferences have become more strongly related to presidential votes among middle- and high-income whites, there is no evidence of a corresponding trend among low-income whites.

• Are religious voters distracted from economic issues? No. The partisan attachments and presidential votes of frequent church-goers and people who say religion provides “a great deal” of guidance in their lives are much more strongly related to their views about economic issues than to their views about social issues. For church-goers as for non-church-goers, partisanship and voting behavior are primarily shaped by economic issues, not cultural issues.

What’s the Matter with What’s the Matter with Kansas?

Bartels’ final version is at http://www.princeton.edu/~bartels/kansasqjps06.pdf (revised after Franks critiqued the critique)