Mario Cuomo Quotes

Democrats don't relate to middle-class people.

We're seeing quite a lot of people who really would like a return to class-based politics.

The truth is the middle class is not only stagnant but it is my fear that, without sustained and focused action, it is at risk of disappearing.

There is a process of social and of political differentiation going on in the real working class all the time.

Millions of people are falling out of the middle class into the ranks of the poor.

One of the things I get amused by is when my opponent talks about the middle class.

Americans have historically been more willing than Europeans to tolerate high inequality levels if accompanied by strong economic growth and a healthy middle class.

The people who talk about the middle class aren't upholding their interests in the legislature.

Historically, it has required a combination of favorable employment trends and active government intervention to lower the percentage of people in poverty and raise living standards for the working middle class.

The hard-working Americans, the people who made this country so great, they've been left in the dust.

If it's conservative to say we need to help the middle class, then I'm a conservative.

The Democratic Party has become the party of the coastal elite, and the Republican Party is the party of the working class and that average American citizen who's been struggling over the past eight years with Obama in the White House.

There once was this powerful, both capital and political, class who cared about supporting and affirming a solid middle class in this country.

Today, families like the one I grew up in still believe in that American dream. But as President Obama says, it's a make-or-break moment for the middle class. Mitt Romney's plans would make things worse.

It's no longer an exaggeration to say that middle-class Americans are an endangered species.

I'm from a working-class background, and I've experienced that worry of not having a job next week because the unions are going on strike. I know that because I don't come from a wealthy background.

A strong economy depends on a strong middle class, but George Bush has put the middle class in a hole, and John McCain has a plan to keep digging that hole with George Bush's shovel.

We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.

Look, there is a sort of old view about class which is a very simplistic view that we have got the working class, the middle class and the upper class, I think it is more complicated than that.

If people continue to feel like Democrats are looking after poor folks and Republicans are looking after rich folks and nobody is looking after me, then we don't get a lot of stuff done. And the trend lines evidence the fact that folks have gotten squeezed. And obviously, 2007, 2008 really ripped open for people how vulnerable they were.

The problem, gentlemen, is that Obama is right: The promise of upward mobility is dying in America, and no amount of political demagoguery will fix it.

The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.

They cannot divide us by saying that you're middle class or you're lower class.

The working class of England today have no vision of society beyond the acquisitive - no version of themselves or their habits as anything other than transitional, on their way up or on their way out. The working class, at best, is a waiting room for people who aim to become middle class if possible.

But I don't think the Democratic Party is at eye level with the middle class.