Mass Appeal (new populism in Dem race)

[BrewerJohn]

So now it's a four-way race, at least sort of. True, it may really be a one-way race: A guy who emerges as the winner in Iowa and New Hampshire is, after all, the favorite in a pretty huge way. On the other hand, Bill Clinton was neither of those things, a small fact still worth remembering, at least for another week.

John Kerry was obviously Tuesday night's big winner. But as I flipped back and forth and back among the cable channels, I kept seeing another winner. More than 200,000 New Hampshire voters turned out Tuesday night. The previous record was about 160,000. That's a signal -- and you better believe that the president's campaign people noticed it -- that anti-Bush turnout could be stoked in November.

And virtually all of those 200,000 -- nearly half of whom were independents, who were eligible to vote in Tuesday's primary -- voted for something that pollsters and experts have been saying for several years now is doomed to failure and that no reasonable person would vote for.

There were, obviously, differences among Kerry and Howard Dean and John Edwards and Wesley Clark. But what's most striking the morning after is what's similar about them: They're populists. Each of them, in his own way, is ripping into corporate special interests and even talking about class in America. Putting out such a message has been absolutely verboten for Democrats in the last few years. And the one candidate (Joe Lieberman) who ran away from populism as if it were a communicable disease finished a very un-Joe-mentum-ish fifth.

More: http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2004/01/tomasky-m-01-28.html

[MissMarple]

1. Populism can be the promise of a better Democratic Party.

Lately, it's been a much more visible topic. I'm reading a book written in 1997 by Michael Lind, "Up From Conservatism". He has quite a bit to say about the Republicans and the conservative intellectual sell out to Pat Robertson.

"Patrick Buchanan exposed conservative populism as the fraud it is by becoming a consistent populist: denouncing affirmative action and Wall Street, homosexuals and corporations "downsizing" their work forces, feminists and rich country-club Republicans.... He, more than anyone else, should have understood that conservative populism was not to be taken seriously,

that it was merely a method of persuading white working-class voters to vote their prejudices rather than their economic interests.

Suddenly, though, he had become a consistent cultural and economic populist in the tradition of George Wallace, Charles Coughlin, Huey Long, Tom Watson and William Jennings Bryan."
pp.2-3

There is lots of good stuff in the book. There is a better American populism and we need to clearly define it and promote it.

[Fovea]

2. I could not agree more

I think a fair number of people support policies and ideas
that they are embarrassed by simply because they think
that the proponents are on 'their side' against 'big government'
but now they see what the plan of the Republican big brother government looks like, they are suffering huge buyer's remorse.