At the Atlantic, Joshua Green suggests that Obama's policy wins seem to be addressing the working poor, rather than the middle class. And he quotes Senator Charles Schumer to support his position:

The Angry Middle Class

Democrats have always claimed to be the party of ordinary working families, but [Senator Chuck] Schumer thought they were deluding themselves. Most Democratic policies, such as the earned income tax credit or increasing the minimum wage, were geared not toward the middle class but the poor. When middle-class Americans heard Democrats describe their problems, it did not resonate because they were actually the problems of the working poor. Schumer believed that the true middle class comprises people in the prime working years of 25 to 60, whose median household income is around $68,000. He urged his candidates to tout aspirational policies that would appeal to them.

''If you win the middle class you win the election, and if you lose them you lose the election,'' said Jim Kessler, the vice president of Third Way, a left-center Washington think tank. ''That's not an opinion, it's a fact. From 1994 to 2004 -- six consecutive election cycles -- Democrats lost median income voters.'' But in 2006 and 2008, with a powerful assist from George W. Bush, they won them and shifted the balance of power in Washington. Schumer read these results as endorsing the idea of a government active on behalf of the middle class.

But,

... none of the administration's three major accomplishments has helped middle-class families in a way that is obvious to them. The stimulus mitigated the effects of the recession, but unemployment remains brutally high. The health-care law most visibly affects the millions without insurance, but that group doesn't include most median-income workers. The rescue and reform of the financial system may have halted the damage to their 401(k)s, but the major beneficiaries appear to them to be Wall Street banks. Indeed, the poll showed that most Americans think that the principal beneficiaries of the government's efforts to restore the economy have been the very same institutions that caused the crisis. ...

...

Schumer is discouraged, but still faithful to his view of the middle class and its requirements. ''People will choose a government that helps them over no government at all,'' he said. ''But they'll choose no government over one they believe is helping somebody else.''

While I think there is some truth in Green's article as written, if you went through it and substituted "Tea Party" for "true middle class," it would make all sorts of sense. Green's and Schumer's middle class sounds like the constituency of the Tea Party, who are indeed convinced that Obama's administration is against them. Much of what I have read in left-leaning opinion pegs the Tea Party as successful, comfortable, managerial, upper middle class types, but all my siblings (a construction super, a bookkeeper, a waiter, a convention facilitator, a cable installer and a legal secretary) support the Tea Party, and while I don't know their incomes, none of them live upper middle class lifestyles. So my personal experience tells me that the Tea Party does have strong roots among ordinary middle class folks - if they are white. I suspect that despite those median income numbers, Green's (and possibly Schumer's) conception of middle class also excludes a good deal of the break-even working class - probably quite a few people that consider themselves middle class. In other words, I think Green's middle class, and the Tea Party has as much to do with culture as with median income.

But even so, while we argue over whether Obama is progressive enough, he and the Democratic machine have not presented a strong enough case to the non-white middle class, either. The unemployed are desperate, most people don't understand how health care will benefit them, and Obama did surround himself with Wall Street insiders who did rescue a lot of wealthy firms.