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President Clinton waited until his party lost control of Congress to propose a "middle-class bill of rights." Some leading Democratic thinkers believe that if President Obama moves more quickly on the latter, he will reduce the risk of the former.

The political dangers that middle-class voters, especially white ones, now present for Democrats are unmistakable. Recent polls have found both blue- and white-collar white voters moving toward a Ross Perot-like skepticism of Washington, largely because of their conviction that the vast sums spent on the financial bailout and stimulus packages benefited the powerful, not people like them. Those findings were underscored by the Republican candidates' strength with the white middle class during their victories in this month's New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races.

Republicans contend that Washington can best support middle-class families by cutting their taxes and otherwise leaving them alone.

All of this suggests that the top political priority for Democrats before next November should be to reassure middle-class voters that Washington understands their economic squeeze and is working to relieve it. This explains why so many Democrats are talking again about a middle-class manifesto.

Clinton unveiled his version shortly after Republicans swept to control of the House and Senate in 1994. His plan focused on tax cuts for parents of young children and for college tuition; later, he unveiled a diverse "tools for parents" agenda aimed at helping busy families balance work and home. Although critics derided these ideas as small-bore, together with a reviving economy they helped Clinton run better among middle-class voters in 1996 than he had in 1992.

Renewed job creation would undoubtedly provide one way for Obama to reconnect with the middle class. But with employment growth still sluggish, key Democratic thinkers are arguing for an agenda precisely targeted at other daily middle-class concerns.

One such thinker is Jim Kessler, vice president of Third Way, a group that advises centrist Democratic senators. Kessler contends that Democrats need to sharpen their focus on working families who are less worried, even in this economy, about falling into poverty than about maintaining upward mobility. These families, he says, "don't really see how government is relevant to them as they seek a path to success," because they earn too much to qualify for many signature federal programs, such as college assistance.

Kessler's answer is an agenda aimed at "helping people achieve success." Guaranteed access to health insurance could provide one pillar of that program, he says. Others could include expanding middle-class college tuition aid and matching grants to help young workers start saving for retirement. Similarly, Heather Boushey, an economist at the liberal Center for American Progress, is pushing ideas to help families better manage work and home. She wants Obama to require federal contractors (who employ about one-fifth of the private workforce) to provide limited paid leave for workers caring for a sick child or relative. That could help spread these benefits to all workers, not just the "highly paid lawyers and professionals" who most commonly receive them now, she says.

The White House is thinking along similar lines. Health reform is its top domestic priority. It also supports a House-passed measure to fund a significant increase in college aid by ending subsidies for private student-loan lenders. It recently endorsed legislation mandating seven days of paid sick leave for workers in all but the smallest companies. And it has established a "middle-class task force," chaired by Vice President Biden, that will propose initiatives early next year in areas ranging from college affordability to the balance of family and work. "Middle-class life is much more fragile than it ... should be," Biden recently declared.

His report will come as Republicans are increasingly contending that Washington can best support middle-class families by cutting their taxes and otherwise leaving them alone. Against that neo-1994 message, Biden's group wants to demonstrate that government can tangibly help these families manage kitchen-table challenges. "They need to have confidence that we are thinking about these things," said one participating senior administration official. "It's urgent when you have elevated unemployment and this anxiety you see about who has really benefited from the things we've done to fix the economy."

Republicans expect a backlash against government to drive the 2010 election. But the same middle-class families who tell pollsters that government is growing too big also complain that it is ignoring them. Producing an agenda that addresses the second concern may be the Democrats' best hope of blunting the first and limiting the sort of electoral losses that inspired their previous middle-class bill of rights.