CINCINNATI: Every politician in the US presidential race claimed to be fighting for the middle class, and it seemed a sound strategy — until the Democratic front-runners tried to define who, exactly, was middle class.

While Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama couldn’t agree during a recent debate whether someone earning $97,500 or more could be considered middle class, voters have little difficulty judging who isn’t — the presidential candidates themselves.

While Republicans and Democrats alike have appealed to middle-class voters for support ahead of the November 2008 presidential election, the sudden attempt to define that category has hit a nerve.

Sparring over tax policy during a debate in Nevada, Obama said those earning $97,500 or more are among the top 6 per cent of income earners, and thus upper class. Clinton disagreed, citing incomes of firefighters and school supervisors.

While her rivals can try to paint Clinton as out-of-touch with poorer Americans in early voting states like Iowa, class has always been an ill-defined concept in America, where all but the poorest and richest consider themselves part of an amorphous middle class aspiring for better.

Census data show about a third of American households earned between $35,000 and $75,000 a year in 2005. The liberal Drum Major Institute for Public Policy says the middle class has come to mean families with incomes of $25,000 to about $100,000.

But economists and voters alike say the definition depends not only on income, but geography, family size and lifestyle.

Fordham University political scientist Costas Panagopoulos said the fact that most Americans consider themselves middle class makes them an impossible demographic to ignore, and a reason candidates like former Senator John Edwards, the son of a millworker, emphasises a modest background.

“Voters can connect to the type of story that someone like John Edwards can tell having grown up in a working-class family and worked his way to the top,” Panagopoulos said.

But the assumption that Democrats represent the middle class and Republicans the wealthy has been challenged.

A recent study found Democrats — who have strongest support in big cities, where living costs are high — often represent wealthier districts than Republicans.

Michael Franc, vice-president of government relations at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank argues that the pressure from wealthy constituents may leave Democrats fighting over where to levy taxes to pay for promised social programmes like health care or Social Security.—Reuters