HERE is a political Rorschach test for this midterm election year. What's your reaction to the following:

These are the best of times in many ways. Americans are wealthier than previous generations, they are healthier and they enjoy a higher standard of living. The good old days simply weren't as good as the present day.

If that makes you a little squeamish, the odds are good that you generally vote Democratic. You see a lot of real problems — widening inequality, a big federal budget deficit, melting icecaps — and you have a hard time believing that the country has never been richer.

But the fact is that by most broad measures — wages, average life span, crime, education levels, home ownership and racial and gender equality, to name a few — life in this country has clearly improved over the last generation.

And most Americans think about their lives in these terms. In polls, even low-income people generally say they are better off than their parents were, probably because most are.

Yet many Democratic politicians just don't seem comfortable talking about the ways that overall living standards have risen, focusing instead on the recent stagnation in wages for rank-and-file workers. "We do talk negative about the economy," Rep. Rahm Emanuel, an Illinois Democrat, told me yesterday, adding that it comes in part with being the opposition party. There is a fear that any good news will somehow help President Bush . . .

In his 2004 convention speech, John Kerry argued that "our great middle class is shrinking." A couple of weeks ago, the spokesman for one House candidate went one better, saying: "This economy is terrible. Republicans are using lies, damn lies and statistics to say otherwise."

In a country founded on optimism, this is a tough sell.

ONE of the most influential political books of the last few years has been "What's the Matter With Kansas?" by Thomas Frank. Published during the 2004 campaign, it neatly captured the Republicans' success in using social issues to attract blue-collar Kansans who don't really benefit from Republican economic policies.

"All they have to show for their Republican loyalty," Mr. Frank writes, "are lower wages, more dangerous jobs, dirtier air, a new overlord class that comports itself like King Farouk," and a culture in "moral free fall."

The book was a New York Times best seller for 35 weeks.

But close inspection uncovers a big problem with Mr. Frank's economic analysis. Wages haven't been falling in Kansas. Up and down the economic spectrum, they have been higher in the last few years than they were at any point in the 1980's or 90's, according to inflation-adjusted numbers from the Economic Policy Institute. The median Kansas worker made $13.43 an hour in 2004, 11 percent more than in 1979, which might help explain why many people don't vote on bread-and-butter issues anymore.

Now, an 11 percent raise over the course of a generation — which is similar to the national increase — is not especially impressive. It's certainly smaller than the increase workers received in the 25 years leading up to 1979, and for the last few years, wages have not risen at all. But they did rise during the 1990's boom, and pretending otherwise does not jibe with most people's experiences.