This will be in tomorrow's Wall Street Journal, I believe in the
Politics section.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704878904575031302539854236.html

The Audacity of Populism
by JESSE WALKER
The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 30, 2010

January 2010 was the month President Barack Obama tried to get in touch
with his inner populist. Shaken by a Republican victory in Massachusetts
and the likely defeat of his health-care bill, he adopted the lingo of
an insurrectionary orator, calling out the big banks in his State of the
Union address.

"If these firms can afford to hand out big bonuses again," he said,
"they can afford a modest fee to pay back the taxpayers who rescued them
in their time of need." For much of the media, that was enough to
conjure an image of Mr. Obama in bib overalls at the head of a pitchfork
army.

That's one possible reaction to the president's rhetoric. Here's
another: How can anyone possibly take this pose seriously? If all you
knew about Barack Obama was that he once held a job called "community
organizer," you might be forgiven for finding something populist in his
persona. The rest of you have no excuses. Even when attacking the
malefactors of great wealth, Mr. Obama evinces all the insurgent anger
of Charlie Rose obsequiously interviewing a starlet.

To cast this man as a populist, you needn't merely imagine an alternate
America where a William Jennings Bryan, the explosive orator who ran
unsuccessfully three times for the White House in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries, has actually captured the presidency. You need to
imagine a Bryan who went to Harvard and taught at an elite law school,
who received more money than his opponent from Wall Street and the
corporate media, who personally intervened during the presidential
campaign to help a bank bailout become law, who surrounded himself with
advisers drawn from Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, and whose solution to
an economic crisis has been to propose a program of corporate subsidies.
A populist? Even at his most liberal, pushing a plan to move the country
toward universal health coverage, Mr. Obama's idea of advancing reform
is to cut deals with all the industries involved so they'll back his
legislation.

There are politicians who have a gift for rabble-rousing rhetoric, and
there are politicians who have a gift for sounding conciliatory even
when they're showing you the back of their hand. There's no question
which category includes Mr. Obama: The same State of the Union speech
that included his little dig at the banks was overflowing with appeals
to bipartisanship. He even threw in a defensive apologia for the Wall
Street bailout.

Mr. Obama's populist act may be unbelievable, but it isn't
unprecedented. Leaders ranging from Harry Truman to George W. Bush have
cast themselves as outsiders challenging the elites even as they occupy
the Oval Office, a base of operations that's pretty much impossible to
acquire unless you have a lot of elite friends. Such presidential
pretensions are one of the stranger side effects of the American
populist tradition.

There are many ways to sort the figures who fall into that tradition.
The most useful approach builds on a distinction drawn by the historian
Lawrence Goodwyn. In "Democratic Promise," his study of the 19th-century
Populist Party, Mr. Goodwyn distinguishes the "authentic" and "shadow"
faces of populism. The key difference here isn't ideology. It's the
depth of a movement's roots.

For Mr. Goodwyn, the "authentic" populists were the farmers who formed
cooperatives and then organized politically to create an environment in
which those co-ops could thrive. The "shadow" populists were fledgling
politicians who attached themselves to the Democratic Party and to
Bryan's gimmicky crusade to coin silver money. The first group, Mr.
Goodwyn argues, was constructing a "democratic culture." The second had
"no institutional base, no collective identity, and no movement
culture," just conventional "hierarchical politics." One emerged from
popular discontent; the other attempted to exploit it.

Mr. Goodwyn is often accused of romanticizing the populists, and his
account, soaked in the ambience of the New Left, is by no means the last
word on the subject. The writer's rival interpreters range from Michael
Kazin, who sees populism as a mutable rhetorical style that is "more an
impulse than an ideology," to Charles Postel, who argues that the
original populist movement was a much more forward-looking, modern
milieu than the more familiar narratives acknowledge.

But whether or not you accept all of Mr. Goodwyn's gloss on the Populist
Party, he has hit on a handy tool for understanding the eruptions that
have broken out since that party departed the scene. Working from his
two categories, we can see the outlines of two populist traditions in
the U.S. The first is the populism of grass-roots groups--some on the
left, some on the right, some hard to classify--that are dominated by
unpaid, part-time activists rather than professional political
operatives. The second is the populism of the people's tribune, a fiery
figure who acts, or claims to act, as a champion of the masses.

The elected tribune typically mixes elements of left and right,
centralization and decentralization, self-aggrandizement and constituent
service. Besides Bryan, this type is represented by the likes of
Louisiana's Huey Long and Oklahoma's "Alfalfa Bill" Murray,
Depression-era governors (and, in Long's case, a senator) whose careers
and views defy easy summary. Long's efforts to redistribute his state's
wealth by any means necessary put him on the far left end of the
political spectrum, but his critiques of the Federal Reserve, the
National Recovery Administration, and military intervention abroad also
overlapped considerably with the views of the populist right. Murray was
both a champion of the Chickasaw and a fierce foe of blacks; he
intervened freely in Oklahoma's economy, enforcing oil-production quotas
and other orders via martial law, but he opposed Franklin Roosevelt's
New Deal.

In some ways such governors resembled the aging progressives in the
House and Senate who turned against the New Deal because it displayed
the same concentration of power that they opposed in corporate America.
But Long and Murray had no trouble with power when it was concentrated
in the governor's mansion.

Confronted with a specimen like Murray, who infamously campaigned
against "the three Cs--corporations, carpetbaggers and coons," it's
tempting to dismiss the tribunes as mere demagogues. But like
entrepreneurs invading a complacent industry, the people's tribune
succeeds by stressing topics his more respectable rivals prefer to
ignore. When ordinary voters feel neglected by ordinary politics, the
tribune will channel their resentments. And if that sometimes means that
ugly sentiments that once were confined to whispers will spill out into
public debate, it also means that legitimate anger about a host of
arrogant policies, from urban renewal to police harassment to corporate
bailouts, can be forced into the open as well.

The tribune is traditionally a politician, but you needn't be an elected
official to play the role. In 21st-century America, the natural place
for the people's tribune is in front of a camera or a radio microphone.
From consumer reporters to talk-show hosts, from Michael Moore and his
calculatedly schlubby style to Glenn Beck and his anticonspiracy
crusades, pop culture is filled with self-proclaimed paladins of the
people who venture into the public arena to wage symbolic battles with
the targets of popular resentment.

Some of those media tribunes are more sincere than others. Taken as a
group, their careers are a mix of self-serving self-puffery, efforts to
co-opt grass-roots enthusiasm for a commercial or political agenda, and,
yes, genuine efforts to expose wrongdoing and to better people's lives.
These are the ambulance-chasing attorneys of American politics: often
obnoxious, not always honest, and sometimes a necessary agent of justice.

You could argue that these rootless radio and TV stars are the
apotheosis of Mr. Goodwyn's shadow populism. Drawing power from the
Nielsen meter instead of the ballot box, they may look like men and
women with "no institutional base, no collective identity, and no
movement culture." But in another way, they indicate that there can be
more to shadow populism than Mr. Goodwyn's dismissive description
suggests. Call-in hosts in particular represent a species that has only
recently emerged: the political leader whose power rests not in his
constituents but in his fans.

I don't mean the distant fandom that helped fuel, say, the rise of
Ronald Reagan. Nor is this the sort of following that allowed earlier
generations of broadcasters and newsmen, from Charles Coughlin to Walter
Winchell, to wield influence without holding office. It's something much
more participatory. Part of the AM-radio host's appeal is that he
interacts directly with his audience every day: He doesn't just speak
but listens, and they don't just listen but argue back. It isn't an
equal arrangement. But the innate intimacy of radio, especially call-in
radio, gives the tribune a connection with his followers that's rather
different from the relations enjoyed by ordinary politicians and
pundits. That really is an institutional base, it can create a
collective identity, and if it isn't a movement culture then at least
it's a fan culture.

The result is an era in which the lines have blurred between popular
culture and populist politics. We not only have Al Franken moving from a
comedy career and a call-in show into the U.S. Senate, we have Sarah
Palin leaving a governor's mansion because she felt she could be more
influential as a media icon than as an elected official.

Government is rarely as unpredictable as it is when members of the
establishment attempt to corral these insurgent energies for their own
agenda. See, for example, the unpredictable dance going on between the
Tea Party movement and the Republican regulars. Look under that big Tea
Party umbrella and you'll find both a grass-roots revolt against the
people who run the Republican Party and a sustained effort to turn the
Tea Parties into a get-out-the-vote drive for the GOP.

President Obama is an indirect beneficiary of the work done by the
netroots, the decentralized online army of activists that is the closest
there is to a left-wing equivalent of the Tea Parties. But in his years
as a national figure, he has no history of trying to hop on the populist
tiger himself. If he intends for this dalliance to be more than a
short-lived posture, he'll be in for quite a ride.