POPULISM ISN'T POPULAR

Seriously Now: Howard Dean's transformation from protest candidate to populist (David Kusnet, 6/24/03, American Prospect)

Howard Dean has been well-served by the rusty ritual of presidential contenders pausing from their campaign travels to go home and formally declare their candidacies.

Subtly but effectively, in yesterday's "announcement speech," Dean recast his candidacy from a protest campaign targeting his fellow Democrats at least as much as President Bush to a populist movement "to take our country back." [...]

While one speech doesn't define a campaign, Dean's announcement can rescue him from being the latest in a line of losing Democratic candidates whose appeal was based on their being intellectually and morally superior to their rivals and, implicitly, their fellow citizens as well. Starting out as refreshingly free from political cant, Bill Bradley, Paul Tsongas, Eugene McCarthy and Adlai Stevenson all ended up appealing to affluent voters who saw politics as an expression of their cultural identities, not a way to improve their own lives and others'. With this announcement speech, Dean has the opportunity to reverse his predecessors' path and inspire at least a segment of those discontented voters whom he gracefully admits understand the nation's problems better than he did when he began his campaign.

Of course the problem is that it's not the people who believe in "populism" but those elites. In fact, one irony is that Governor Dean's slogan, "take our country back", is borrowed from the conservative populist movement to Take Back Vermont, a reactionary grassroots campaign against gay marriage, environmental regulation, and the use of statewide property taxes for public education. Sadly for the Left, the people are wahoos. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 26, 2003 10:13 PM