Those shots, he said, "were just like orthopedic shoes — a source of middle-class Jewish pride".
It is a point the administration echoes when it says that manufacturing will be an important source of middle-class jobs.
But solar panel manufacturing — a potential source of middle-class jobs, and an important reason the White House was so high on Solyndra, which made its panels in Fremont, Calif.
Whatever you think of the urge behind that efficiency — whether you see it as the wellspring of American competitiveness or the source of middle-class insecurity — there's no question that it is a cause of the dismantling of the private-sector safety net that has served the country well over the last half century.
With companies abandoning pensions, home values -- the leading source of middle-class savings -- devastated, and fewer families able to save adequately for retirement, more and more Americans will rely on Social Security's guaranteed benefits to provide a lifeline in retirement.
Second, there is a big debate under way over the sources of middle-class economic anxiety.
Even before the Civil War, the hair business provided the single most important source of a middle-class income and a respectable life of relative ease for men and women who were once, or whose parents had been, slaves, and whose likeliest avenues of employment were manual labor and domestic service.
For the Al Gore wing of the Democratic Party, it has become a symbolic battle in the fight to save the planet; for the Joe Biden wing, Keystone and the unconventional oil revolution are a source of the middle-class jobs many feared modern economies could no longer provide.
In a world where logistics will be the source of a huge number of middle-class jobs, we have FedEx and U.P.S.
