On April 12 last year, Hillary Clinton formally announced her run for the presidency by posting a two-minute video on YouTube. For the first minute and a half, Clinton was nowhere to be seen. Instead, the video showed a montage of a dozen or so Clinton supporters: a middle-aged white woman tending to her garden; two Hispanic brothers starting a business; a pregnant young black woman and her husband unpacking boxes in a sun-dappled suburban living room; a burly, bullet-headed white man surveying an American-flag-draped warehouse.
It was a carefully constructed portrait of the American middle class, or the parts of it that tend to vote Democratic — like the patchwork of Carhartt and Ann Taylor that Barack Obama gathered around himself for a speech in Cincinnati early in the 2012 campaign, when he proclaimed himself a “warrior for the middle class.” American politicians genuflect toward the middle class so reflexively that failing to do so in a speech or a statement about the economy seems almost heretical — which it turned out was the most remarkable thing about Clinton’s video.