You know it’s coming and yet it’s always somehow a surprise when it arrives. Joe Klein spent New Year’s Eve blasting the front-running populists of both major American political parties. It’s not just Klein. A healthy percentage of the Washington opinion writers have put their nose to the grindstone over this holiday season to slam John Edwards and Mike Huckabee for their populism. Populism seems to be a genuine fear that the Washington Establishment attacks without any regard for facts. It’s obvious and disturbing when their guns are aimed at Hugo Chavez or some other third-world left-leaning leader. They’ll call him a dictator without so much as a blush, despite the fact that Chavez is a democratically elected official. But it becomes something insidious when this type of mendacity is aimed at the American left.
First of all, John Edwards isn’t even an established representative of the American left. Until 15 minutes ago, he was a New Democrat poster boy for the Democratic Leadership Council and a co-sponsor of the Authorization to Use Military Force in Iraq (2002). He’s been moving left rhetorically at about the same rate as the country at large.
Secondly, Mike Huckabee is, by his own campaign manager’s admission, more George Wallace Democrat than traditional Republican.
Mr. Rollins, for his part, traced Mr. Huckabee’s political lineage back to George Wallace in 1968 (without the segregationism). Mr. Wallace and, later, Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot appealed to the same blocs of working-class voters and socially conservative white Southerners that the Republican Party began trying to court in Senator Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign.
Santorum sees a slightly different Democratic Party heritage for Huckabee.
Some doubt Mr. Huckabee’s distinctive style will translate as well beyond Midwestern states like Iowa — the region where Christian populism was born in the person of William Jennings Bryan. “I see Huckabee as more of a Prairie populist than what I would consider a traditional conservative,” said former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, a stalwart of the conservative movement once considered a 2008 presidential contender himself. “I don’t see how he takes that show across the East Coast or even the Midwest.”
All of this is confusing the pundits. Edwards, for example, is not running a William Jennings Bryan or George Wallace Campaign. If he has an antecedent it is the Farmer-Labor Party of the Upper Midwest.
The first modern Farmer-Labor Party in the United States emerged in Minnesota in 1918. Economic dislocation caused by American entry into the war put agricultural prices and workers’ wages into imbalance with rapidly escalating retail prices during the war years, and farmers and workers sought to make common cause in the political sphere to redress their grievances.
The Minnesota DFL has provided Democratic giants like Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, Walter Mondale, and Paul Wellstone. That’s the kind of Establishmentarian populism we’re really talking about here. It’s nothing revolutionary…and by combining it, in Edwards, with the trial lawyers and Research Triangle tech-savvy professionals, and giving it a Southern twang…this kind of populism has a new face in American politics.
Meanwhile, Huckabee truly is a throwback to Jennings Bryan, who most famously argued against evolution at the Scopes trial. He also sounds a bit like the Know-Nothings, but so do all the other Republican candidates, save McCain. Xenophobia and biblical literalism are now the near exclusive domain of the Republican Party…at least, in terms of brand. That’s why Huckabee is not running as a Democrat. But he’s really an old fashioned snake-oil salesman and populist from the old school. His type is dangerous. But not because he doesn’t give a crap about the interests of hedge fund operators. He’s dangerous because he is not acquainted with the 21st-Century.
However you slice it, the people want populism. They don’t want to destroy the business community, but they want something done about the ‘dislocation caused by American entry into the war [that] put agricultural prices and workers’ wages into imbalance with rapidly escalating retail prices.’
And that means that Edwards and Huckabee should do very, very well in Thursday’s caucuses. The corporate media is afraid.
