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SAN JOSE, Calif. On the West Coast to raise millions of dollars for his party, President Obama spent the second half of this week preaching to rich supporters about why Democrats are better than Republicans. It sounded like a conventional stump speech in the windup to the midterm battle including a rote apology to the first lady for running another campaign.

Listen closely, however, and you could hear the president making a much more dramatic statement about the importance of this years elections.

As he toured a series of mansions, Obama made the case that should Democrats fail to keep their hold on the Senate and win back the House, both his second-term priorities and the countrys future could be imperiled.

He described the publics dissatisfaction with Washington as nearly at a tipping point, where working-class Americans see leaders as unresponsive to their most basic concerns. If that were to continue, he said, more middle-class Americans could dismiss the political process completely.

Youve got a self-fulfilling prophecy, Obama said Wednesday evening in Los Angeles at the home of Disney chief executive Alan Horn and his wife, Cindy. People who have the most at stake in a government that works opt out of the system. Those who dont believe that government can do anything are empowered. Gridlock reigns, and we get this downward spiral of even more cynicism and more dysfunction.

In this appearance and others, he warned that such apathy would show up primarily among young, minority and working-class voters precisely the groups that Democrats need to head to the polls to win the midterms.

And if Democrats fail to win, he said, America could be at risk of losing the luster that has defined it for so many years.

Theres no other country that looks like us. Its a huge gift, he said Thursday night in San Jose at an event hosted by Marissa Mayer, chief executive of Yahoo, and Sam Altman, president of YCombinator. The problem is that well waste that gift if we dont make the right choices.

The president rejected the idea that America was in decline, but he said it could happen if the right steps werent taken to invest in the economy.

What is absolutely true is if we dont make good choices, we could decline, Obama said.

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Obama warns Democrats that midterms could imperil his agenda and America