The Fire This Time

Monday, Jan. 12, 2004 By JOE KLEIN

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Watching Dean on the stump these past few weeks, I tried to remember the last Democratic politician who was so joyously vituperative. (Pat Buchanan was the last Republican.) Suddenly, as Dean ranted one evening about "Washington bureaucrats like George W. Bush and Tom DeLay who want to dictate to your local school boards," I realized that he reminded me of George Wallace--a liberal version, to be sure, and without the theatrical racism. But Wallace was about a lot more than racism. He was about the inanities of Washington, the "pointy-headed intellectuals who can't park their bicycles straight." He was a little guy too, with the same chestiness, the same rolled-up sleeves as Dean. He was congenitally pugnacious, a former boxer (Dean was a wrestler). He claimed to provide a voice for the voiceless--albeit a set of alienated Americans very different from Dean's affluent Net surfers. Wallace voters were, well, white guys with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks. And he was a formidable national candidate. In 1972, he won Democratic primaries in Michigan and Maryland. His slogan--"Send them a message"--could easily be Dean's. In fact, Kerry has taken to saying "We need to send them more than a message, we need to send them a President."

Ironically, Kerry--who even when riding a Harley seems to be the world's least plausible man of the people--is offering the second most aggressive populist pitch among the Democrats--in some ways, a pitch more clever than Dean's. Kerry isn't angry so much as disdainful; the saliva is carefully rationed. He mocks the President's more unfortunate moments, like "Bring 'em on." He does his best work with "Mission accomplished." "The Bush Administration will be measured by those words," he told a crowd in Portsmouth, N.H. "But whose missions have been accomplished?" He proceeded to list the familiar miscreants who have been rewarded--the lobbyists who wrote the energy bill, the drug companies, the wealthy recipients of the Bush tax cuts. "But what about those other missions that need to be accomplished? What about jobs, health care...our relations with the rest of the world? In those cases, it's been Mission abandoned. Mission not attempted. Mission ignored."

Kerry mixes his populist assault with policy solutions that are more detailed and attractive than Dean's. The Senator was the first Democrat to propose a crash energy-independence program, not just to free the U.S. from its dependence on foreign oil but also to develop new environmental technologies that could replace dwindling manufacturing jobs. All the Democrats now have similar plans, but Kerry pushes his more assiduously than the others do--and he offers it as an implicit alternative to the harsh protectionism (and thus higher prices) pushed by Dean and Gephardt.

This is not to say that Kerry will stage a remarkable comeback. He has dithered too publicly about the war in Iraq. Even on his very best days, he lacks Dean's vigor and electricity. But if the Democrats do mount a successful populist campaign against Bush, it will have to be sunny and sophisticated, with the anger carefully rationed. In other words, it will contain, as Kerry's stump speech now does, equal quantities of those eternal military-marching properties--polish and spit. If the nominee is Howard Dean, he'll have to work on the polish.