Today President Obama delivered another speech on the economy that conservatives and the press greeted with varying shades of mockery and boredom. His calls for corporate tax reform and promises of "help for the middle class" are familiar campaign rhetoric and weakly echo the idea of "class warfare" that Republicans love to brandish as evidence of Obama's socialism, lack of "American values" or worse.

One could argue that this is the language that won Obama the presidency, why change what works? (And, as few in the press seem to realize, neither they nor conservatives are Obama's real audience for these speeches.) But it's unclear either that Obama won the presidency on pure merits (as opposed to people voting against the Bush legacy and Romney) or that this language is, politically speaking, "working". It's this language that keeps the Tea Party energized, after all. It's the threat of these policies that keeps corporate interests so deeply involved in elections in general.

And, as I wrote last week, appealing to "the middle class" is no longer a safe political bet. Today, Americans still identify as "middle class" more than anything else, but as the economy continues to shudder, polls are beginning to echo the precariousness of that perch.

On Monday, the Associated Press cited a survey showing that 79% of Americans will experience "economic insecurity" by the time they turn 60. At some point, pandering to the middle class will begin to feel like pandering to those who already have it easy. If Obama wants to truly energize voters, and to use their energy to sway recalcitrant Republicans, he needs to do more than make promises to those in the middle class, he needs to make them understand that the middle class as a category is threatened.

The AP defined "economic insecurity" as unemployment during the year, or a year or more of reliance on government aid, or income below 150% of the poverty line – and this concrete measure reflects reality much more reliably than a fuzzy, optimistic notion of middle class.

Middle class is a set of values, perhaps, or a way of measuring one's happiness; that it has nothing to do with income or wealth is apparent from the polling about it. When Pew asked Americans in 2012 if they were "middle class," a impossibly wide swath of 49% said they were. Around the same time, a Congressional Research Service report drily noted (pdf) that the literal middle class – those with incomes in the third quintile of American earners – make between $38,000 and $62,000, an income range "so narrow" it seems "unlikely...[to] account completely for those commonly considered to be middle class".

The report suggested that expanding the definition to the three middle quintiles (the middle 60%) of earners might make the economic category of "middle class" comport to the self-identified category, though that would mean lumping together as "middle class" everyone with incomes between $20,000 and $101,000. I don't think those people, in real life, are lumped together very often – though flying first class on airplanes is now so expensive it can mean that people from either end of that spectrum aren't just lumped together but sitting on each other's laps.

The AP's measure is more instructive, because it captures the slipperiness of reality that our minds can refuse to adjust to. That Pew survey showed that a startling 6% of those earning over $100,000 considered themselves to be "lower class", while another 6% of those earning less than $30,000 considered themselves to be "upper".

It's tempting to think we need a reality television show in which these bipolar "six-percenter" families live next to each other when I realized that our new economic normal means that families whose fluctuating economic station is out-of-sync with their identity live next to each other all the time. The AP's survey, and numerous other findings, report that those identifying themselves as "lower class" and as having experienced or expecting to experience poverty are increasingly white, suburban and – the fastest-growing demographic – young.

Indeed, young people between the ages of 18-29 saw a 14% jump in identification as "lower class" between 2008 and 2012, compared to 8 points among whites, 10 points among Hispanics, and zero change among blacks.

I take perhaps perverse comfort in that number, because of all the categories in American life where there are divisions, it's among young people where the barriers of color, class, and even geography are the least significant. Young people interact with each other in schools, around pop culture, through social media and in their imaginations: to be young is to be able to envision something different for yourself, and from yourself

American politicians, both liberal and conservative, have used class – and the need for "welfare" as a code for race – for the past three decades. They got away with this because so many white people could not imagine themselves as anything but middle class – and because they refused to see benefits like the home mortgage credit as being just as much of a government "handout" as food stamps. The AP's findings show that many white Americans, "middle class" Americans, can no longer afford such illusions.

Tea Party Republicans insist on speaking about government programs, and criticizing Obama, using terms that have been racist "dog whistles" for a generation. But there are fewer and fewer dogs to hear those whistles, and more and more people who are hungry. These are the people Obama must reach out to, whom he must make listen.

Social change on grand scale happens because of social interaction on a small – even one-to-one – scale. Young people today favor gay marriage and relaxed immigration laws because, more likely than not, they know a gay person, or an immigrant. Almost half of those under the age of 30 say they have a close friend or relative that's gay; 85% of our 11 million illegal immigrants are under the age of 44, one in five public school students are legal immigrants.

A recent study suggested that empathy is on the decline among American youth; that may be so, but I suspect that the recession has made empathy less relevant than commiserating – one doesn't need to be able to imagine the pain of another if you are in pain as well.

It's pain that leads to action. We are human, there is simply no other kind of motivation; however noble our goals, we don't seek them unless there is dissatisfaction with what we have. Obama keeps rallying "the middle class," but it's the subtle message – amplified by his enemies – about the elusiveness of class that will reverberate into the future.