Too often we liberals try to sell programs by appealing to altruism, arguing that we must help people in need. Appealing to altruism is fine and good, and in rare cases – when children are beneficiaries for example – it may be sufficient. But, I fear, it is seldom sufficient by itself. Human beings can be altruistic. But let’s face it: we are probably first and foremost self-interested. Citizens are most likely to favor programs when there is something in it for them.

That’s how FDR successfully sold Social Security. Social Security ensures that needy seniors are not thrust into poverty or become burdens to their families. But everyone benefits from Social Security. It keeps some seniors from the poorhouse, but it augments retirement income for everyone. That’s why it is so popular as to have become the third rail of American politics (“Touch it and you die”).

Conservatives portray liberals as unrealistic altruists who are forever concerned about the plight of the poor and vulnerable but not concerned about working people and the middle class. We liberals – as conservatives portray us – are willing to heap burden upon burden upon hard-working Americans in order to satiate our altruistic impulses. Conservatives suggest we are naïve, foolish, softhearted, and empty-headed. They suggest that we are on neurotic quests to salve guilt for our privileged lives. They even exploit conspiracy fears by suggesting that we are motivated by a Machiavellian plot to expand government because we expect to control the levers.

Most often these arguments are made in code. William F. Buckley Jr. famously said that he would “sooner be governed by the first two thousand people in the Boston telephone directory, than by the two thousand members of the faculty of Harvard University.” In the 1988 presidential campaign, George H. W. Bush said his opponent, Michael S. Dukakis, was ''born in Harvard Yard's boutique.'' Neither Buckley nor Bush was a populist. Moreover, they were both born with silver spoons in their mouths – and educated at Yale.

What were they talking about?

Buckley and Bush were deploying the Harvard faculty as liberal archetypes – people living in ivory towers, comfortable, tenured, oblivious to prosaic concerns such as making a profit or avoiding a layoff; self-satisfied idealists who look down on the average Joe and Jane but have bleeding hearts for the downtrodden. It’s proved to be an effective trope.

It is therefore essential that we liberals explain clearly that we are concerned about the entire commonweal. We cannot afford to be perceived as caring principally for the needy. In reality and in perception, liberalism must be a philosophy concerned deeply about the middle and working classes.

Here are two examples about what this means in practice.

Last week, Richard M. Aborn wrote an op-ed titled “Reloading the Gun-Control Debate” for the Washington Post. Arguing why Americans should be concerned about gun violence, Aborn observed: “African American youths are five times as likely to be killed as a result of gun violence than their white counterparts.”

That’s entirely true and entirely lamentable. Moreover, it’s disturbing because if white youths were shot at the same rate as black youths, the nation probably would not tolerate existing levels of gun carnage. I’m not suggesting that whites don’t care because they are racist. I’m suggesting they don’t care – at least not enough to become politically aroused – because they, like everyone else, are self-focused. They don’t think gun violence affects them or their kids. Someone who tells them that African American youths are being shot at five times the rate of white youths is also telling them that white kids are being shot one-fifth as often as black kids, thereby reinforcing the view that gun violence is not their problem.

Another example is the debate over the Affordable Care Act, or as conservatives like to call it, Obamacare. During the initial debate, when proposals were being considered by Congress, proponents most often made the argument that reform was necessary to cover the uninsured. This was telling people with health insurance that they had to pay higher taxes to help others. The Congressional Budget Office reported that the legislation would not add to the deficit – savings would counterbalance costs – but that did not make sense to most people. Surely, they thought, it would cost more to give people insurance.

The Act should have been sold principally as being about fairness, personal responsibility, and cost-containment. When people without insurance become ill or injured, they receive care anyway through hospital emergency rooms. Someone has to pay hospital free care and bad debt costs, and the people who pay are the people with insurance. Hospital charges are inflated to cover those costs, and people with insurance pay those costs in form of higher health insurance premiums. (To the extent employers pay their premiums, they pay the costs indirectly in the form of lower wages.)

The famous “universal mandate” is not only about expanding coverage. It is about requiring that everyone contribute his or her fair share to the system. People receive government subsidies for insurance premiums, but only to the extent they need them.

During the debate over the Act, the term that should have become embedded in the public consciousness was “free rider.”

What term did become embedded in the public consciousness? “Death panels.” But that’s another story.

In an earlier post, I explained why – based on the evidence – I believed that almost certainly Elizabeth Warren identified herself as a Native American for institutional rather than personal reasons, that is, not to gain an advantage in the job market but to help her employer’s diversity statistics. Since that post there have been interesting developments that I shall discuss here. But if you have not already done so, you should read my earlier piece first.

Yesterday Elizabeth Warren announced that she told the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard law schools that she was Native American. She says that she told both schools this after they hired her. In an interview with the right-wing website Breitbart.com (hereinafter “Breitbart”), Robert C. Clark – who was then dean of Harvard Law School and the person who hired Warren – provided information that dovetails with Warren’s claim. Clark says that although Warren’s “gender may have been in the minds of several members of the faculty” when they decided to offer her a permanent position, he did not know that she claimed to have a Native American ancestor until after he extended a job offer.

It is important to pause briefly for some important chronology. As I mentioned in my earlier post, Elizabeth Warren was a super-star, and Harvard did not have an easy time recruiting her. Clark offered Warren a tenured position at Harvard Law School in February 1993. But Warren’s children were in high school in Philadelphia, and she did not then want to uproot her family. Clark told Warren he would keep the offer open. Warren accepted two years later, in February 1995, and took up her permanent position at Harvard that fall, after her children had graduated from high school.

Clark says that it was during this two-year period – after he extended the offer but before Warren accepted it – that Warren told him that her great-great-great grandmother was Cherokee. Curiously, Breitbart does not report the circumstances under which Warren related this to Clark. Breitbart has been vigorously beating the drums to discredit Warren, and it is inconceivable that its interviewer did not closely question Clark about that conversation. Breitbart does, however, quote Clark as follows: “When I learned of it from her, I thought it was an interesting side note, because my own family lore through my grandfather was that we had a Choctaw ancestor in my own family.” Whether Warren’s mentioning her Native American ancestor was prompted by Clark mentioning his, or vice versa, may be something neither participant remembers, and is of little importance.

Professor Charles Fried, who was on the faculty committee that recommended Warren’s appointment, also says that he did not know that Warren claimed Native American ancestry before Harvard hired her and that it never came up during the committee’s discussions. Fried says that he learned about it later at a party in Warren’s home when he remarked on a family photo.

Clark told Breitbart something else of significance: “A few years later, around 1996 or 1997, I made an offhand comment in an informal get-together with a Native American student group about this Choctaw family lore. Eventually a law school administrator asked me if I wished to list myself as Native American in some of our EEOC reports, but I politely declined.” As I theorized in my earlier piece, it is likely that Warren came to be listed as a Native American in similar fashion, that is, she mentioned her great-great-great grandmother in casual conversation, and administrators or others later asked her to list herself as Native American to help their schools' diversity statistics.

For the very same reasons that the right-wing is ridiculing her, Warren would have turned off any law school appointments committee that thought that Warren – with 1/32 Native American blood and no connection to a tribe or Native American community – was attempting to win their favor by claiming to be Native American. And Warren is smart enough to have known that.

Should Warren, like Clark, have told law school administrators that she did not want to list herself as Native American? It is easy to answer yes. Nevertheless, it is difficult for anyone – even law school professors – to refuse a request by an employer.

The bottom-line is this: Additional evidence further supports the theory that Warren identified herself as Native American, not for advantage in the job market, but to help employers’ diversity statistics.

Among endless material about the election, a piece particularly worth reading is Michael Tomasky’s review of Linda Killian’s book The Swing Vote: The Untapped Power of Independents, published by St. Martin’s Press. Tomasky’s article, titled Swingtime for Obama, appears in the June 21 issue of The New York Review of Books. You can access NYRB’s website here, but as of now it doesn't have the June 21 issue up on its site.

Tomasky notes that although as many as a third of all voters in eight battleground states will be registered independents this year, most independents lean decisively to one party or the other. The true swing vote is composed of about twenty percent of nominal independents – six to seven percent of the electorate – who truly vacillate. It is this group that is potentially winnable by either Obama or Romney and likely to determine the outcome of the election.

Who are they? In the main, they are white. They are diverse in educational backgrounds: some have only a high school degree, many have some college but did not earn a college degree, and some have college and even graduate degrees. They tend to lean Democratic on social and environmental issues but Republican on fiscal issues. However, they are an economically vulnerable group (or perceive themselves that way), and economic issues are their highest priority. They believe in fiscal prudence and are concerned about the deficit. They are widely dispersed geographically, but Tomasky believes that the most decisive of these voters live in exurban areas – that is, beyond the suburbs – that surround large cities in battlegrounds states. Obama carried some of these key areas by two to three points in 2008.

Who will win over swing voters this year? Probably the candidate who succeeds in persuading them that he is the most capable on economic matters. If neither candidate appears to these voters to be clearly preferable on economic and fiscal issues, then the president has the advantage because swing voters lean his way on social and environmental issues.

[A note on style: The observant reader will note that I have stopped italicizing names of books, magazines, and court cases and putting quotes around the titles of articles. Although, as an academic, it's somewhat difficult for me to adopt this convention (followed by most newspapers), I've decided that it results in a cleaner, easier-to-read look on a screen. Of course, I'll use italics and quotation marks whenever necessary for clarity.]