The Fire This Time

By Joe Klein

"The biggest issue in this election is jobs and economic security," Howard Dean said in Urbandale, Iowa, a few days after Christmas. "Iraq is an important issue, but it's not as important as jobs." This seemed to be the sort of thing Dean practically never does--a descent into standard party cant. Democrats are almost always depressed about the economy and rarely obsessed by foreign policy. It was doubly odd because Iraq has been Dean's signature issue. He would probably be an asterisk today if he hadn't stepped out from the pack and opposed the war. And the election of 2004 is bound to be, in the end, a referendum on George W. Bush's historic pre-emptive decision to route the war on terrorism through Baghdad.

But Dean isn't really talking about jobs, even when he says, "Let's talk about jobs," which he does, first and foremost, in every stump speech. Very quickly he turns to pummeling the President about "$3 trillion worth of tax cuts for his wealthy contributors." Indeed, "jobs"--shorthand for the 3 million jobs lost during the Bush Administration--turns out to be camouflage for an even hotter topic: the rampaging privileges that the corporate elites have won during the past three years. This is Dean's real theme, a unified-field theory of Republican depravity. Jobs, the elderly, the economy, budget discipline, the environment--all have suffered because of Bush's crony capitalism. Dean recently produced a fabulous piece of propaganda, a leaflet called Common Sense for a New Century, after Tom Paine's famous Revolutionary War tract. "We face a growing threat to our liberty and justice in America today," he writes. "Thomas Jefferson and James Madison spoke of the fear that economic power would one day seize political power. That fear is now being realized. Under the Bush Administration, pharmaceutical companies draft our Medicare laws. Oil executives sit in the Vice President's office and write energy bills ..." And on and on.

This is classic populism--"the people versus the powerful"--and four years after Al Gore unsuccessfully ran on that slogan, populism is at the heart of not just Dean's campaign but almost every Democratic presidential candidacy. Senator John Edwards puts the case most elegantly: "This is an Administration that rewards wealth, not work." Dick Gephardt is the protectionist tribune of the antique industrial unions. Aristocratic John Kerry rails effectively against "Benedict Arnold" corporations that set up headquarters overseas to avoid paying taxes at home. Even mild, moderate Joe Lieberman has a tax plan to soak the rich and further reduce taxes on the middle class. There may be some desperation in all this. Bush has taken issue after issue away from the Democrats. He has "reformed" education and given a prescription-drug benefit to the elderly--fairly sketchy initiatives, but most voters don't read policy papers. The economy seems poised to recover. And the President may even be moving quietly toward depriving the Democrats of their most popular foreign-policy complaint--that he hasn't involved the U.N. and NATO in Iraq. (Both may well be involved in the transition to a new Iraqi government this spring.)

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.

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.