Anxiety Attack

Insecurity. Perhaps that explains why for even those who do have jobs and can afford the niceties of life, there is a pervasive sense of unease. "I think what people are feeling is a fundamental economic insecurity," says Yale University political scientist Jacob Hacker. "And what those polls are really saying is that our country isn't doing well and families aren't doing well."

That resonates with Mike Parker, a 65-year-old journeyman electrician at DaimlerChrysler's Sterling Heights, Mich., assembly plant. "People are scared, absolutely scared," he says. Parker ticks off a litany of concerns that one would probably expect to hear from a union worker in the troubled U.S. auto industry. Under pressure from foreign competition, the days of fat benefits packages and lifetime employment are a thing of the past. "It used to be that workers here could have a decent job, support a family, put a kid through college, and plan on retirement," Parker says. "All that is disappearing. ... If you lose your job in your 40s or 50s, it's very hard."

Adding to the worries are the increasing burdens being placed on middle-class workers. They now have to make their own investment and healthcare choices as well as find the money to fund their 401(k) and 529 plans. Hacker calls this transfer of responsibility from government and corporations to individuals "the great risk shift," also the title of his book due out in October. In such a climate, it's little wonder that Bush's call for a partial privatization of Social Security--a key element of his vision of an "ownership society"--fell flat.

Democratic pollster Nancy Wiefek says this economic insecurity amid a time of plenty is becoming the defining political issue of the moment. "The main political cleavage now is no longer income but risk," she says. "Lots of people welcome risk and the idea of not knowing what they will be doing in five years and reinventing themselves and becoming their own brand and all that. But for many others, that idea is not so great." A 2005 Battleground poll co-run by her firm, Lake Research Partners, asked people whether they were "more concerned with the opportunity to make money in the future" or with "the stability of knowing your present sources of income are protected." Just 29 percent favored opportunity, compared with 62 percent who chose stability.

Interestingly, actual changes in job tenure haven't been that dramatic of late. Between 1983 and 2004, according to the Labor Department, the median years of job tenure with the current employer for male workers 25 and over dropped from 5.9 years to 5.1 years. For male workers 35 to 44, tenure dropped from 7.3 years to 5.2 years. For male workers 45 to 54, tenure dropped from 12.8 years to 9.6 years. But shorter job tenure can be a sign of prosperity, as the biggest declines in tenure tend to occur when the economy is good and people feel confident about switching jobs. Ann Huff Stevens, an economics professor at the University of California-Davis, analyzed the careers of men ages 58 to 62 and looked at how many years they spent working at the job they held the longest. In 1969, the figure was 21.9. By 1998, the figure was 22.0. "It seems that there is less evidence of a large change in long-term employment than the level of anxiety would suggest," Stevens says.