The Fire This Time

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This leaves one potentially profitable path for the Democrats. Polling indicates that the public mood has changed for the bitter after three years of lagging economic growth and corporate scandals and a stream of stories about the Administration's closeness to corporate oil interests, such as Halliburton. According to this week's TIME/CNN poll, 57% of the public (and 63% of independents) believe that Bush "pays too much attention to Big Business." Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster affiliated with MSNBC, has been monitoring the Democratic debates with televised "dial" groups in which individuals react instantaneously to political rhetoric. "When the candidates go after the special interests," Luntz says, "the dials go off the charts." (When Luntz ran similar groups in 2000, there was usually a negative response to politicians who were angry.)

Populism has a long, unsuccessful and fairly dreadful history in American politics. There was one brief, shining moment in the 1890s when rural populists organized themselves into a political party and produced a brilliant cache of reform initiatives. Their best ideas--antitrust laws, federal food-and-drug regulation, the income tax, the Federal Reserve System--were soon appropriated and enacted by mainstream political parties. More often, populism has been a demagogic and reactionary force, the province of left-wingers who hope to profit from public resentment of the rich, and of right-wingers eager to blame the vagaries of life on shadowy cabals--bankers and fat cats, immigrants and foreigners, blacks and Jews. Happily, this most optimistic of republics has never had much use for such tawdry darkness.

The Democrats' current populist flirtation is somewhat sunnier. It stems from the hope that the political pendulum has swung as far to the right as it possibly can--away from the responsible taxation and regulation of corporations, away from an essential small-d democratic sense of fairness--and is ready to swing back. Bill Clinton was that rarest of breeds--an optimistic populist, the first Democrat to argue that the current globalization of the economy is similar to the nationalization of the economy a century ago and that a new set of reforms is needed. John Edwards' candidacy has been a test-tube example of Clintonian populism. He has offered a moderate, positive and quite comprehensive set of proposals to democratize corporate governance and provide new incentives for the working poor and middle class. But Edwards' candidacy is missing an essential ingredient: he doesn't have anything nasty to say about anyone. Populism just ain't populism without spit in the air.