As a socialist, middle-class aspirations now seemed decidedly unambitious.
And we're going to hear an awful lot about how Sen. Barack Obama, his Democratic opponent, is a socialist, who middle and upper class taxpayers should fear as the tax Bogeyman.
At which I grind my teeth and remember the small sponge pessary my mother used in the 1930s, and begin to hum one of the songs for Socialists: "The middle classes/ me and you/ Already know a thing or two/ But oh the poor/ they breed like rabbits/ They have the most disgusting habits".
In countries where the data stretch back to before 1990, they show that socialist-era middle classes (or their children and grandchildren) have managed to reconstitute themselves.
These disagreements are understandable: Yemen's opposition contains a cornucopia of dissenting groups, incorporating Shia rebels, southern separatists, socialists and middle-class urban professionals.
The National Front party that led the nationalization effort was actually a coalition of liberal reformers, the intelligentsia, elements of the clerical class, socialist activists and middle class professionals.
For instance, were he to halt a campaign by his tougher lieutenants against the Prisa media group, which was cosy with the previous Socialist government, many middle-of-the-road Spaniards might be reassured that the PP is a party of moderation.
Building on the achievements of recent years, he said, China would become "a strong, prosperous, democratic and culturally advanced socialist country by the middle of this century".
If he had been less of a revolutionary than a kind of Socialist apostle to the middle class, it was still true that a number of revolutionary changes had taken place in his lifetime.
Communists quickly took over the ranks of socialist organisations, scaring the middle classes.
