. >> joining me now is eleanor clift from the daily beast. eleanor, good morning. >> good morning, alex. how is the president as congressman ryan was saying there. has he broken his promise in bringing people together? >> it's laugh bli clever how he turns it to the republicans' favor. i thought one of the signs in the rallies said it's only class war when we fight back. the numbers don't lie. the top half to one percent has done extraordinarily well over the last 30 years and the 99 pirs has many of the protesters are calling themselves have lost ground. i think that the republicans have been quite successful in portraying the president as the person who is not making the accommodations, when i think if you look at the deals that have been struck on capitol hill, i mean, the president's supporters think he gave away far too much. yet the republicans have been really diabolically -- then pointing a finger at the president and saying hey, you're not able to fix it. so it's an odd turn in our politics. i think the president is now trying to poin

joining me from washington, eleanor clift of newsweek and the daily beast. ou. >> good morning, alex. >> what's the problem here? what should the president be doing that he's not doing? is it all about this word class? >> middle class is a state of mind. a lot of people who make more money than would technically qualify them to be in the middle class as we define it think of them as middle class. the better phrase is middle income. inherited wealth, country clubs is another caricature of high class. nobody wants to be called lower class. middle income, lower income, upper income would help us confront the inequities that exist. >> we don't say lower class, or upper class. should we not even say middle class? >> well, i think -- i can't issue a ruling that nobody say middle class. it's now become part of the culture. and bill clinton, i think, used to consider himself a president who cared about, i think he used the phrase forgotten middle class. michael dukakis in 1988 said he was fighting for the middle class. democrats typically are fighters for the middle