Which Brand Would You Buy?

As I've watched the deep foolishness that has marked the first months of George W. Bush's second term as President—both parties seem zealously intent on ignoring the common good—I've been thinking about a fellow I used to know, a marketing whiz named Jim Matson. Jim invented Heartland Natural Cereal, the first mass-market granola, which came in a sepia-toned box. It was a brilliant response to growing public nostalgia and a desire for "natural" products in the 1970s. His favorite pastime was to walk down a supermarket aisle sensing the products that weren't there. No doubt, if Jim took a stroll through the American supermarket of ideas today he would find some compelling products missing too. In a poll of voters conducted by Democrat Diane Feldman, who worked for John Kerry last year, 72% agreed that the "nation's leaders see ... the current problems and opportunities differently from the way [I] do."

There are, of course, plenty of different ways to look at problems, but I suspect what's really missing here are the two most important political products: a Party of Sanity, representing the pragmatic centrism of the business and professional elites, and a Party of Passion, representing populist anger about outsourcing, illegal immigration, social permissiveness and Bush's overseas activism. In fact, Democracy Corps—a polling consortium run by Democrats James Carville, Stan Greenberg and Bob Shrum-- tested products named after well-known popularizers of the economic aspects of these points of view: the eminently Sane New York Times columnist Tom Friedman and the surprisingly Passionate CNN anchor Lou Dobbs. Stick around for the results of the Dobbs-vs.-Friedman election, but first ... a few caveats.

There is no such thing as a pure political product. The two existing political parties are amalgams of passion and sanity, traditional liberalism and conservatism. Those who win the presidency create harmonic majorities by plausibly balancing these strains. A pure populist has not been elected since Andrew Jackson. And since Franklin Roosevelt, all the elitists have taken pains to demonstrate their common-man credentials. For most of the past century, the Friedmanite establishment tended to be moderate Republican, and economic populists like Dobbs found a home in the Democratic Party.

But Ronald Reagan tapped into a vein of conservative social populism that changed the G.O.P., and a series of effete intellectual candidacies—from Eugene McCarthy's to John Kerry's—has reflected the Democrats' transformation into a party dominated by well-educated coastal professionals. In the 2004 election, Bush beat Kerry among the white working class by some 24 points.

But the real oddity of American politics in the information age has been the relative powerlessness of both populism and elitism.

Dobbsians despair about the rule of corporate interests; Friedmanites despair about the reign of witless partisanship. Both groups, but especially the Friedmanites, are appalled by the willingness of politicians—and yes, the press—to let social issues like the life and death of Terri Schiavo and peripheral fights over presidential appointments overwhelm the traditional priorities of economic and foreign policy. But the political landscape may be about to change.

The Party of Sanity has rallied in recent weeks. The first sign was the bipartisan agreement by 14 U.S. Senators to preserve the filibuster rule while allowing a vote on some of President Bush's more conservative judicial appointments. Some experts opined that this marked the beginning of a third force in the Senate—the Philadelphia Inquirer even suggested it held the potential for "a third party of the center"—but what it really marked was the restoration of business as usual: control of the Senate by moderate consensus. A second sign came on May 29, when the New York Times reported that 24 leaders of groups ranging from the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the liberal AFL-CIO had been meeting secretly for seven months because they were worried about the sketchy, inefficient quality of American health care and wanted to figure out a proposal for universal coverage. Two weeks earlier, Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Newt Gingrich, the yin and yang of politics in the 1990s, announced that they had found common ground on the issue as well. The renewed search for a comprehensive health-care solution reflects a deeper tide of concern in corporate America over the debilitating costs of providing health insurance and pensions for employees. These concerns are accompanied by general alarm in the Party of Sanity over the fiscal irresponsibility of the Bush Administration, the continuing frustration over the war in Iraq, and the Administration's failure to lead instead of attempting to dominate an Alliance of Sanity in the world.