Populism as style and rhetoric has long dominated American political campaigns. Its roots reach back deeply into the nation’s history to the American Revolution and the early days of the Republic. In the colonial struggle for independence from Britain, as well as in the making of the national constitution, American political leaders invoked “the people’s sovereignty” as the theoretical basis of their rebellion and subsequent nation-building.Footnote ²

Although “the people” might be sovereign, the Founding generation of gentlemen tended to be exclusive rather than inclusive in their often vague definitions of just who constituted the people. In the early years of the republic, Virginia gentlemen, for example, were not above “swilling the planters with bumbo” on election days, but they tended to disdain courting voters. In the post-Constitution states, which resembled aristocratic republics more than “democracies,” candidates “stood” for office rather than “ran,” while their political allies exerted “influence” on their behalf.

But by the 1820s, aspirants for office not only couched their appeals to and for “the people,” they also styled themselves as truer representatives of ordinary folk than their opponents. Andrew Jackson, the first president not from Virginia or named Adams, won election in 1828 in large part because of his popularity as a military hero, but also because he seized the populist mantle of the “common [white] man.” Even so conservative a political leader as Senator Daniel Webster declared, in his famous 1830 debate with South Carolina’s Robert Y. Hayne over the nature of the Union, that it was “the People’s Constitution, the People’s government, made for the People by the People; and answerable to the People.”

In 1840, General William Henry Harrison, a sometime Indian fighter, parlayed his military reputation and alleged log cabin roots into a winning presidential campaign for the Whig Party. Harrison indeed had won battles against Indian and British foes, but he had been born on a Virginia plantation, a son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Nevertheless, the Whig’s “Hard Cider and Log Cabin” campaign of 1840 became a historic marker of the triumph of populist posturing in elections.

To be sure, authentic populist movements arising from the grass roots and claiming to represent the people also have played a prominent role in American political history. They have ranged from armed agrarian insurgencies in the late eighteenth century to social movements and third parties in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that also employed a populist rhetoric and style. Populist social movements and parties, too, have been both progressive and reactionary, and often have mixed contradictory impulses from opposite sides of the political spectrum.Footnote ³ The focus here, however, will be on the rhetorical and symbolic populism expressed by various candidates during the presidential campaign of 2008. In any year, a latent populist mentality forms part of the bedrock of American politics, but in 2008 lingering culture wars and a staggering economy repeatedly intensified populist appeals in the presidential campaign.

A populist strategy aims to align candidates with ordinary people who lack power or are being oppressed by undemocratic elites who wield excessive power. The essence of populist language is to set up an us who claim to speak for the people against a they of elites or a powerful few who have taken over or corrupted the political system and rigged it to benefit themselves. These few have assumed various incarnations throughout our history, including “aristocrats,” “the money power,” “the Slave Power,” “capitalists,” “robber barons,” “malefactors of great wealth,” and “economic royalists.” Economic populism has usually struggled against cabals of the wealthy and powerful who not only oppressed but looked with contempt upon ordinary people. A Kansas Populist of the 1890s characterized them as “the aristocrats, the plutocrats, and all the other rats.”

More recently, especially since the rise of anti-Communism in the 1950s and the culture wars growing out of the 1960s, an invigorated cultural populism has targeted an additional set of elites that are alleged to violate traditional “values” of morality, family, and religion. These cultural elites inhabit big cities, universities, and Hollywood and look down on ordinary, “everyday” Americans who live in small towns or rural areas. Cultural populists’ enemies tend to have un-American “values,” foreign tastes, and especially put themselves on the wrong side of divisive issues that offend religious fundamentalists: reproductive rights for women, gay marriage, prayer in schools, public religious displays, and opposition to censorship. Cultural populism enjoys fervent enthusiasm among many average Americans, especially the religious right, but its propagation has also been well funded by wealthy conservatives and aggressive business networks intent on cutting taxes, deregulating the economy, and wresting other economic advantages from conservative legislators and presidents.

Attacking one’s opponents as un-American, or unmanly, or too learned and intellectual is nothing new in the nation’s political history. Anti-intellectualism, especially, is imbedded deep in popular culture. But since the 1950s, an anti-intellectual cultural idiom has held a prominent place in our political campaigns.Footnote ⁴

Michael Kazin has argued that up until World War II populist rhetoric had been expressed generally by political leaders seeking progressive reform or social justice, or challenging the status quo on behalf of the dispossessed. The latter, however, did not usually include racial minorities. Kazin and other scholars have shown that for the last several decades populist rhetoric, particularly that focusing on cultural issues, has been appropriated by conservative champions of corporations, free market ideologues, the religious/fundamentalist right, and the white backlash against the civil rights movement. “It was a remarkable shift. The vocabulary of grassroots rebellion was now used to reverse social and cultural change, rather than to promote it.” And, in the words of Thomas Frank, “Cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends.”Footnote ⁵

Progressive economic populist appeals, however, have hardly disappeared. Rather, during a political era of conservative ascendancy, they have coexisted while lagging behind a cultural populism that also manages to graft onto itself a faux economic populism. Both progressive and reactionary populist rhetoric and symbolism figured prominently in 2008 and, despite the rather negative view of populism generally that prevails among some thoughtful observers, they continue to be woven into the fabric of American political culture.Footnote ⁶

The 2008 presidential campaign unfolded in circumstances that encouraged candidates to channel frequent expressions of populist anger directed at both economic and cultural elites. Popular frustration and indeed outrage drew heavily on powerful currents of discontent: a seemingly endless unpopular war, an economy shedding jobs, mounting foreclosures, and declining home ownership. Economic insecurity rose, feeding an overwhelming conviction among citizens that the country was headed in the wrong direction. Indeed, by early October 2008, a Gallup poll found that only 9 percent of Americans were satisfied with the direction of the country, the lowest margin since 1979 (12 percent).

In the early stages of the campaign in 2007, when both major parties fielded several candidates vying for the nomination, populist candidates appeared across the political spectrum, from John Edwards and Dennis Kucinich on the left to Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee on the right. Just the name “Mike Huckabee from Arkansas” has a populist ring to it, even without a nickname such as that acquired in the 1890s by the prairie Populist orator known as “Sockless Jerry” Simpson. Jeremiah Simpson won that sobriquet campaigning against a well-dressed Republican politico known as “Prince Hal” Halowell. Simpson pointed out that all princes wore “silk socks,” but he, Jeremiah Simpson, wore no socks at all.

A populist message is still conveyed by casual clothing when candidates mingle among voters at factories, community centers, clubs, or local halls. The venue and the clothing are meant to convey connection to average people. Though not necessarily sockless, they appear in shirtsleeves or open collar, or wearing a sweater, windbreaker, or zippered jacket—the latter often bearing the logo of the crowd’s association.

In 2000 and 2004, George W. Bush, from a privileged background and a graduate of elite schools, effectively presented himself as an ordinary guy, and set up a Potemkin-like ranch in Texas for “brush-cutting” (sold as soon as he left office). It is well documented that in 2000 the press corps much preferred Bush and his easygoing style to, in their eyes, the uptight, professorial style of Al Gore. “W” was the “guy” they—and many ordinary Americans—would have preferred to sit down with and hoist a brew. Subsequently he became the president who addressed a tuxedo-clad gathering of corporate tycoons by saying that he was happy to be there with “the haves and the have-mores.” But Bush’s success in conveying a “regular guy” persona—in contrast to the nerdy, policy-wonk images of his opponents Gore and John Kerry (2004)—weighed on the minds of the candidates and consultants of both parties who sought to succeed him.

Accordingly, in 2007–8, populist candidates flourished among the several hopefuls fielded by both major parties. On the Republican side, Congressman Ron Paul, the country doctor from Texas, offered a mix of progressive and mostly reactionary populism. Mike Huckabee appealed far more than Paul to religious Republicans, but with a smile and a dash of economic populism. The former Arkansas governor also had a much bigger impact on the Republican primaries than Paul, undercutting former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s formidable candidacy by winning Iowa and drawing evangelical voters away from Romney in other states. He also pleased his religious base by professing his nonbelief in evolution, following in the footsteps of that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan. Like Bryan, too, Huckabee articulated a sharp economic populism, criticizing corporations, calling for changes in U.S. trade policies, and charging that Wall Street held too much power over the nation’s economy.

Most of the Republican candidates, with the exception of John McCain, took a tough stand on illegal immigration and expressed a widespread populist impulse among Republicans to control our borders and not to provide blanket amnesty to undocumented immigrants. This posture of course taps into a long-standing nativist strain in American society, though it also draws upon legitimate resentment of job losses, lowered wages, cut benefits, and economic exploitation by the likes of Wal-Mart and Swift Meat Packing.

On the other side of the political spectrum could be found the most unmixed example of a progressive populist, Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio. From his life story, to his standing up to the banks and power companies as mayor of Cleveland, to his exile and vindication in the 1990s, Kucinich fit the profile of a people’s champion. Although dismissed by many pundits as one of the “vanity” candidates, Kucinich championed a long list of progressive causes.

The mainstream Democrat most often associated with populism was former vice presidential candidate John Edwards. Edwards, in case the reader has not heard, is the son of a mill worker and the first in his family to go to college. A writer in the progressive Nation magazine described Edwards as “Populism’s Candidate” because Edwards had cast himself as a fighter against corporate power on behalf of those who have lost jobs as manufacturing fled the country. After the defeat of the Democratic ticket in 2004, Edwards worked conspicuously to fight poverty and announced his candidacy for ’08 in the Katrina-ravaged Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans.

Edwards designed his populist campaign to appeal to the Democratic base in the primaries. Some critics regarded it as insincere, and pointed to the “three H’s” as contradicting his professions: his $400 haircut, his home of 28,000 square feet in Chapel Hill, and the hedge fund where he worked after 2004 that invested in companies that foreclosed on mortgages held by victims of Hurricane Katrina. Critics also suggested that perhaps a multimillionaire lawyer was not the best spokesman for the poor. On that point, given the role of money in our politics, if the well-off cannot speak for the poor and disadvantaged, who will?

Less well covered than Mr. Edwards’s wealth and hair but also standing in marked contrast to his populist campaign was his pro-corporate record as senator from 1998 to 2004, when he voted for free trade deals opposed by labor unions, including normalizing trade relations with China. In 2007–8, Edwards said that he regretted many of these votes and, like his vote authorizing President Bush’s Iraq war, they were mistakes.

None of this is unusual in American politics. Witness the transformed, trans-America Mr. Romney on the Republican side, who in Massachusetts had won election as governor as a cultural liberal and efficiency-oriented business Republican, but who flipped wholesale to right-wing conservatism for the Republican primaries. Similarly, Edwards embraced a populist platform as a strategy to win the Democratic nomination. His problem, however, surfaced in one of the final three-way Democratic debates between him and Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Just after an exchange in which his rivals had pointed to the historic nature of each of their candidacies, Edwards ruefully commented to the effect that, well, I’m the white guy.

Edwards left the race on January 30, 2008, and from February to early June, Senators Clinton and Obama infused their campaigns with earthy populism as they competed to win over the working class and economically distressed voters who presumably had supported Edwards. During the rivals’ drawn-out and grueling tong war for the nomination, Obama had already established a lead in elected delegates that he never relinquished. But the continuing closeness of their race intensified the struggle as well as their populist campaigning, as did the fact that a potentially decisive number of uncommitted superdelegates intently followed the proceedings. Clinton stayed in the race hoping to convince those delegates that she was the more electable in a general election, even if Obama managed to win more primary and caucus delegates.

The fierce competition and the passionate followings of each candidate also stimulated a remarkable outpouring of enthusiastic participation as the supporters of each campaigned and voted in primaries in unprecedented numbers. Modest policy differences separated Clinton and Obama, but each embodied a different and sharp contrast to the occupant of the White House, and their followers invested each senator, quite reasonably, with hopes for dramatic changes in policy from the Bush administration. Thus the Democratic primaries of 2008 themselves generated impressive displays of grassroots populist engagement by new voters and previously unengaged Democrats and independents who embraced Clinton or Obama with an enthusiasm not remotely comparable to that elicited by Al Gore or John Kerry eight and four years earlier.

Apart from the competition for Edwards voters, the troubled economy and the unpopularity of most Bush administration policies ensured that the Democrats would continue to deliver messages of economic populism. By February, news reports of the two campaigns regularly emphasized the Democrats’ adoption of “Populist Postures.” “Clinton and Obama Attack Big Business” ran one headline. The report asserted that Senators Clinton and Obama “intensified their populist appeals … responding to widespread economic anxiety and pushing the Democratic Party further from the business-friendly posture once championed by Bill Clinton.”

With polls showing that two-thirds of Americans favored some sort of intervention in the economy, both candidates criticized oil company profits and “special interests,” and promised more infrastructure spending and the creation of “green” jobs. In March, too, the first rumblings of what would become a Wall Street earthquake began to be felt. In mid-month, JPMorgan Chase stepped in to buy the investment firm Bear-Stearns at $2.00 a share, with the Federal Reserve providing emergency loans and financial backing for the rescue package. By early June, Bear-Stearns, which had employed fourteen thousand, formally ceased to exist.

Clinton hammered away at hedge-fund managers, drug-company subsidies, and the “two oil men in the White House,” while Obama said that with Bush-Cheney the wealthy had “made out like bandits.” He also called for ending tax breaks to corporations that move jobs to foreign countries and denounced trade agreements laden with “perks for big corporations but absolutely no protections for American workers.”

Conservative observers such as the London-based Economist lamented the criticism the Democrats directed at free trade, but a memo leaked from the Obama campaign in March embarrassed the Illinois senator while comforting free traders. A senior member of the Obama campaign apparently had told Canadian officials that the candidate’s criticism of NAFTA was “political posturing.”

Presumptive Republican nominee John McCain, however, criticized both Democrats’ attacks on free trade as preaching “the false virtues of economic isolationism.” McCain had secured the Republican nomination as early as March 3 with big wins over his remaining challenger, Huckabee, in primaries in Ohio, Texas, Vermont, and Rhode Island. Up to that point his campaign had shown little interest in developing populist themes. When he began to outline his economic proposals in earnest in April, more than one observer described them as “traditional GOP tax-cutting with a dash of populism sprinkled on top.” The “dash” consisted of acknowledging the “economic pain” many Americans were experiencing and denouncing corporate malfeasance and “extravagant salaries and severance deals for CEOs.”Footnote ⁷

That same month the temperature of populist heat in the Democratic contest shot up because of an unguarded statement by Obama that his opponents jumped on to charge that he was out of touch with ordinary people. This was the first of several events that would cause spikes in the populist content of the campaigns.

On Sunday, April 6, at a private fund raiser in San Francisco, Obama (unaware of being recorded by a Huffington Post blogger) responded to a question about working-class people in small towns and rural areas voting for conservatives. He answered that economic hardship made them “bitter” and so they “cling to their guns and religion.” Despite his remarks, containing what some commentators acknowledged as considerable truth—one quipped that a candidate’s “gaffe” now consisted of saying something that was true—this incident damaged Obama. And it gave his opponents the opportunity to brand him as an “elitist” and to tout their own populist bonding with ordinary folk.

“Elitist, out of touch, and frankly patronizing,” said Clinton, as her campaign distributed “I’m Not Bitter” stickers and buttons. McCain joined in the critique and shortly after launched his call for a summertime gas tax holiday, removing the 18.4 cent per gallon federal tax from Memorial Day to Labor Day. When Obama along with most economists rejected the idea as a gimmick that would do nothing to dampen gas prices, McCain and Clinton kept brandishing the tax holiday, though there was no chance Congress would enact it. Clinton upped the ante by adding that the oil companies should be forced to pay the difference with a windfall profits tax, another unlikely outcome.

To highlight her differences with Obama, Clinton now told her audiences of how her father had taken her hunting and taught her to shoot. Most memorably, in the town of Crown Point, a Chicago suburb in Indiana, at Bronko’s Restaurant and Lounge, the media recorded her downing a shot of whiskey and a beer, just like one of the guys. (One “geographic irony”: the NAFTA-bashing Clinton’s whiskey was Crown Royal, made across the border in Manitoba, Canada.) By early May, Clinton had transformed herself from a corporate lawyer into Mother Jones.

“Hillary Rodham Clinton began the campaign in pearls, assembling a team of fundraisers that included luminaries from New York’s financial services sector.” Now she was waging it “in pickup trucks, Dairy Queens and fire stations, taking a 2-by-4 to ‘Wall Street money brokers’ and vowing to break up oil-rich OPEC.”Footnote ⁸

Obama fought back, first by apologizing for poorly chosen words with his “bitter” remarks, and with speeches that were “unabashed populism,” but he stumbled again by looking to find the common touch in a bowling alley. Besides wearing a tie, he posted a miserable score (37) while sending several balls awkwardly off the alley into the “gutter.” Clinton immediately called for an end to “gutter politics,” and offered to settle the nomination with a bowling match—signaling that she, unlike Obama, was a regular guy and no nerdy elitist. While Obama was still reeling from the “bitter” fallout, however, Clinton too suffered self-inflicted damage when she was found to have exaggerated the dangers of a 1996 visit to wartime Bosnia, boasting, falsely, that she had landed at an airport there in danger of sniper fire.

Both print and electronic media covering the primaries intensified the rivals’ battle to wear the populist mantle by relentlessly addressing the question of how white working-class Democrats were voting in the primaries—most of them for Clinton. Although blacks, the young, and the college educated cast ballots reliably for Obama, women, the elderly, and whites, especially males, without college education leaned heavily toward Clinton. Pundits on cable news programs focused relentlessly on identifying disaffected white working-class voters as the key swing vote in the Democratic primaries and in the general election to come. The media’s obsession with the white working class—they hardly ever mentioned an upper class—allowed wealthy commentators on cable networks to engage in their own form of populist pandering running parallel to that of the candidates.

White working-class voters’ favoring Clinton in Democratic primaries continued to be a central theme of media coverage as she defeated Obama in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and racked up huge margins in West Virginia and Kentucky. But Obama’s lead in delegates remained steady and in mid-May, John Edwards, who had based his campaign on populist appeals to the working class and poor, endorsed Obama. On June 3, finally, despite Clinton’s much-trumpeted hold on white working-class voters, and what one critical reporter called her “paste-on populism,” Obama clinched the nomination by reaching the needed number of delegates—augmented by a rush of superdelegates after the final decisive primaries.Footnote ⁹

Now the question would be whether McCain or Obama could stake a stronger claim to being a people’s candidate.

Obama vs. McCain. During the summer months no new populist themes overtly entered the campaign. McCain’s campaign became less populist in style because he did fewer “town meeting” events as his advisers started cutting down on his unscripted exchanges with voters as well as reporters. This resulted in part from McCain’s staff deciding that the “liberal media” had turned against a candidate they had previously admired and were now out to play “gotcha” with him. In late July, however, they managed to put Obama on the defensive after he toured the Middle East and Europe and spoke, as in the United States, to admiring throngs. On July 30, the Republicans began running television and Internet spots comparing Obama to “celebrities” like Paris Hilton, all show and no substance, not a “man of the people,” just popular.

Although Obama’s advisers worried that the “celebrity” attack was damaging, they were ultimately unwilling to give up the crowds who clamored to see Obama speak. This resulted from the Obama organization’s pursuing a kind of “technological populism.” At every rally the audience was asked to pull out their cell phones and to call or text friends and neighbors to support Obama. The campaign also signed up hundreds and thousands of volunteers or donors on the spot. This “techno populism” had begun months before and continued into the fall. It climaxed during the Democratic nominating convention in Denver in August, when extra cell towers were brought to Ivesco Field to handle the outpouring of calls and texting.

Another kind of populism—symbolic—formed the setting for Obama’s acceptance speech before an audience of some eighty thousand. He spoke from a stage with a backdrop of a neoclassical temple facade, four huge Doric columns and ten substantial pilasters connected by a frieze and arranged in a curving arc. One architectural critic saw the setting as conveying stability, martial strength, and deep historical continuity, as well as “populism and public participation—the highest-minded ideals of democratic government.”Footnote ¹⁰

Up until the nominating conventions, themes of economic populism had been most prominent. Amid worries about job losses, foreclosures, and shaky financial institutions, the cultural populism evident in both Clinton’s and McCain’s efforts to brand Obama as an intellectual elitist had not taken on the status of a full-blown culture war. That changed dramatically with McCain’s startling choice of Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. With Palin’s acceptance speech on September 3 to the Republican convention, the culture wars and right-wing populism as embodied by Palin suddenly took center stage in the campaign.

McCain’s inner circle of advisers picked Palin precisely because of her conservative populist appeal to the Republican “base,” which Karl Rove had mustered for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. Although previously unknown to the nation, Palin had been governor of Alaska for two years and before that mayor of a town with a population smaller, said one wag, than that of the bleachers in Fenway Park. But Palin effectively presented herself as an “everyday American,” a small-town girl, a hockey mom, mother of five, including an infant with Down syndrome, an NRA member and moose hunter, and an opponent of abortion even in cases of rape and incest. She claimed to be, like her newfound mentor John McCain, a “maverick” reformer.

Palin’s speech signaled her role in the campaign: to energize the evangelical right and to attack Washington, the media, and cultural “elites,” and to link Obama to them (eventually she would try to link Obama to terrorists). Her denigration of Obama as a “community organizer” subtly referenced the 1960s in the way Republicans habitually had used that decade’s upheavals. Indeed, her spunky defiance of the media elite recalled the 1964 Goldwater convention and radical-right Republican delegates screaming invectives and shaking their fists at television newsmen.

One of Palin’s harshest critics called her speech, crafted weeks before by a Bush speechwriter, “a political masterpiece, one of the most ingenious pieces of electoral theater this country has ever seen.” And Palin’s delivery was bravura. With smiles, winks, nods, and cheerful smirks, she played the crowd like the beauty contestant she once was. In the following weeks, her appearances on the campaign trail indeed “energized the base” as thousands turned out to see this new celebrity, who embodied a counter-narrative and counter-symbol to Obama’s. Palin skillfully worked the “us v. them” rhetoric, and associated herself with “Joe Sixpack,” working class [white] folk, and especially, in her pandering to rural, small-town Americans, “the real America.”

On the ticket “to be something,” Palin embraced her role with a vengeance, brushing off criticism of her lack of readiness for office and lack of knowledge of public affairs by retreating into a populist mantle of the virtues of the ordinary and average. Palin’s masquerade of populism distracted attention from her extreme policy positions, but after the McCain-Palin ticket received a bump in the polls from her meteoric debut on the national scene, Palin mania steadily eroded.

The Republican “base” remained excited about Palin, flocking to rallies where she was present (but not to those featuring only McCain). One Republican columnist declared that, like Reagan and Goldwater, “she embodies the values of the American West.” Conservative William Kristol, never one to conceal his own erudition and one of Palin’s recent tutors in current affairs, offered a populist defense of Palin by claiming that most of the recent blunders and delusions of American public policy have been made “by highly educated and sophisticated elites.”Footnote ¹¹ Meanwhile, however, several prominent Republicans and conservative columnists (Kathleen Parker and George Will, among others) defected from the Palin bandwagon. Independents and moderates took a second look at her readiness for national office.

By October 9–12, a majority of those polled by Pew Research thought Palin unqualified for office (52 percent after her debate with Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden). Her populist aura diminished, too, following revelations of a designer clothes shopping spree minimally set at $150,000.

The last major effort of the McCain campaign to make a populist connection with ordinary Americans came on October 15 during the third and final presidential debate. It arose almost by accident when Obama, campaigning in a Ohio suburb, was asked by a local resident about his tax plan. The citizen, Samuel Wurzelbacher, said that he was planning on buying a business with an income of over $250,000 and believed Obama’s tax proposals would affect him adversely. Obama answered by pointing out how small businesses would benefit as well as incur taxes with his plan, and finished by saying that fiscal policy should benefit everyone ultimately, including those on the bottom, “you know, spread the wealth around.” During the debate three days later, McCain brought up “Joe the Plumber” repeatedly, accusing Obama of wanting to raise taxes on ordinary people and “spread the wealth around.”

This populist gambit attracted the usual media frenzy but ran out of steam even more quickly than Palin populism. “Joe the Plumber’s” name was not Joe, nor did he have the resources to buy a business, nor was he a licensed plumber, and he had problems with unpaid taxes. McCain’s use of “Joe” sputtered to embarrassment on the morning of October 30, when he called for Wurzelbacher to come forward at a rally and “the plumber” failed to appear. The “spread the wealth” charges against Obama continued, however, escalating to “socialism.” Some media commentators saw the charge as not simply ludicrous but a sign of desperation.

Obama meanwhile steadily counterattacked by claiming that 98 percent of small businesses and anyone else who made less than $250,000 a year would have their taxes reduced. McCain’s tax plan, he claimed, favored corporations, not workers, and McCain would give more tax breaks to corporations that “shipped American jobs overseas.”

In early October at a Pew Forum discussion in Washington on the role of “the culture war” in the campaign, several of the panelists agreed with the proposition that “Economic populism almost never triumphs. It’s easier to resent intellectual arrogance than economic success.”Footnote ¹² But in this election the inexorable downward slide of the economy made economic populism the trump card, and the Obama campaign’s relentless association of Senator McCain with Bush administration economic policy took its toll.

So too did mistakes by McCain. In September, the financial crisis worsened and the government took control of mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The pillars of Wall Street finance began to crumble or needed to be shored up by government. Lehman Brothers went under. Insurance giant AIG and other firms needed tens of billions of federal dollars to stay afloat. As this economic meltdown intensified, McCain assured voters that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.” The Democrats pounced on this statement and kept hammering away at themes of economic populism. Surprisingly, as the crisis deepened, Obama crafted an image of steadiness, while McCain appeared rudderless, veering in many directions.

In the final weeks before the election, the culture war ignited by Palin faded, and McCain-Palin attacks on Obama as a “socialist” or “palling around with terrorists” rang hollow, arousing only the Republican base. Obama’s decisive victory in the popular vote (66,882,230 to 58,343,671) put him 7 percentage points ahead of McCain (53 percent to 46 percent). But the spread among the real plumbers—not the unlicensed tax dodger named Samuel—was even greater. Among families with incomes of less than $50,000 a year, Obama beat McCain by 60 percent to 38 percent. Blue-collar cities throughout the country, like Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden’s hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, voted for Obama.

This should have come as no surprise, but for the media obsession with the conservative “values” of the white working class.Footnote ¹³ The notion that this group has become more conservative and is moved inordinately by moral issues has been sharply challenged by Princeton political scientist Larry M. Bartels. His research shows that low-income whites “have actually become more Democratic in their presidential voting over the past half-century, partially countering Republican gains among more affluent voters.” Even more against conventional wisdom, Bartels finds that low-income white voters “continue to attach less weight to social issues than to economic issues.” Further, his analysis suggests that economic issues remain central in presidential elections, “especially among ‘the people on the losing end’ of the free-market system.”Footnote ¹⁴

In 2008, economic populism trumped cultural populism within a deteriorating economy and a weakening of religious zealotry. In 2004, gay marriage referenda in thirteen states had brought out the Republicans’ right-wing evangelical base. But popular attitudes to mixing religion and politics showed signs of declining. In 1996, 54 percent of those polled believed it proper for churches to engage in politics (43 percent opposed). After slight declines to majorities of 51 percent in 2000 and 2004, by 2008 a small majority of 52 percent now believed that churches should keep out of politics, with 45 percent still approving.

Economic populism alone did not determine the outcome of the 2008 election, but it pervaded other framing elements of the November vote, particularly the retrospective perception that the Bush economic policies had failed and that McCain was associated with them and Obama was not. Most voters were not “better off” in 2008 than they had been in 2004, and they knew it. The unpopular war in Iraq, a worsening of the U.S.-Allied war in Afghanistan, scandal in the Justice Department, the administration’s handling of Katrina, and much more influenced the outcome. Further, it needs to be noted that Barack Obama, willing to pound away at oil company profits, at tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy, at corporations that ship jobs overseas, at unfair labor laws, and more, is no thoroughgoing economic populist.

Like Clinton during her primary run, Obama throughout the campaign enjoyed support from financiers and Wall Street. Speculation arose early in the campaign that if Obama were elected president his Supreme Court appointments, like those of Bill Clinton, were unlikely to be economic populists.Footnote ¹⁵ Political analysts often commented on Obama’s restrained brand of economic populist rhetoric, even during September. He himself said on one occasion that his populism was aimed less at frustration with big business as with dysfunctional government. “When you hear me talk about people versus the powerful,” he told a Washington Post reporter in August, “my populism is built most powerfully around the sense that government is nonresponsive to these folks. They’re probably less angry at Wall Street for making money and angrier at Washington for not just setting up some basic rules of the road.” Why, then, he was asked, single out oil companies for a windfall profits tax? Because, he said, the companies’ “outsized profits” had no relation to their investments or production costs. Just after, at a town meeting, however, he responded to the same question differently: “Does it make more sense for the oil companies to pay for it [the tax], or does it make more sense for the struggling waitress who is barely getting by to pay for it?” “And the answer is, I’m going to fight for the waitress, not because I hate the oil companies but because I think it’s more fair.”Footnote ¹⁶

The rhetoric of economic populism flourished as job losses mounted and Americans’ retirement accounts dwindled. And a good deal of sincerity infused Senator Obama’s calls for fairness. But just as Obama needed to avoid sounding like “an angry black man,” so too he could not adopt the populist style of a Dennis Kucinich.

At times, as in his rejection of a summer gas tax holiday, Obama’s populism consisted of a Harvard Law School populism that rejected simplistic solutions and, as in his historic speech on race, treated voters as adults. Barack Hussein Obama sprang from an economic and cultural background a world apart from the blueblood, old-money origins of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But when the aristocratic FDR denounced the “economic royalists” in the throes of the Great Depression, no one confused him with the demagogue Huey Long. During Obama’s dramatic presidential campaign, he not only projected, but, according to all inside accounts of his decision making at critical moments, maintained a cool detachment. Though not of the gentry bred, Obama’s sangfroid might have drawn the admiration of that Upper Hudson River Valley patrician with the cigarette holder and his jaunty upper-class breezy confidence.

The 2008 victory of a candidate of education and intellect, after a campaign in which the opposition targeted those qualities as “elitist” and antipopulist, represents something of an anomaly. Although the pattern is not airtight, candidates painted as overeducated and out of touch with ordinary Americans more frequently have lost presidential elections. The branding of Adlai Stevenson as an “egghead” comes to mind, along with the depictions of Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, and John Kerry as technocrats or bookish intellects without the common touch. Dukakis’s appeal to “competence over ideology” notably failed to play in Peoria.

The anti-intellectual strain of American populism began conspicuously in 1828 with the victory of “unlettered” Andrew Jackson over the learned and intelligent incumbent, President John Quincy Adams. Jackson postured as the fierce enemy of elites and a champion of the people. His supporters trumpeted his popularity as a military leader, which, as Daniel Walker Howe recently pointed out, constituted an ancient but not necessarily democratic political appeal. The contest, said the Jacksonians, was: “Between J.Q. Adams who can write/And Andy Jackson who can fight.” Jackson’s well-organized campaign of emerging politicos relentlessly mocked Adams’s erudition and his experience as a diplomat, establishing “a pattern in American politics, warning aspiring politicians to conceal their intellect rather than proclaim it.”Footnote ¹⁷

In 2008, Senator Obama not only deflected attacks on his intellect and “elitism” but also tilted in his favor the populist economic impulses energizing the electorate. Yet if well-tempered populism can be highly effective as a campaign strategy, it can also be a hindrance to governing and crafting policy. Populist appeals of any kind inevitably raise expectations for results, and disillusionment with or withdrawal from politics on the part of segments of the citizenry have been the flip side of promises to give government “back to the people” or to transcend “politics as usual.”

Increasingly in American political life, popular expectations ranging from deliverance to doom have focused on the presidency. But this is hardly a new development. Bruce Ackerman, in The Failure of the Founding Fathers, described the rise of the “plebiscitarian presidency” coming into being as early as the 1800 election of Thomas Jefferson. According to Ackerman, the president came to represent the “Voice of the People,” and became a tribunal chief executive not anticipated or wanted by the makers of the 1787 Constitution, leading to institutional confrontations that periodically have threatened to upset the constitutional balance of power. While I disagree with Ackerman’s locating this development in the early republic, the term “plebiscitarian presidency” well describes both the accretion of power to the presidency and the populist expectations that have gravitated to it since at least the mid-twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁸

But powerful as the presidency has become, those expectations are often unrealistic. Many citizens, holding a wide variety of policy preferences, get caught up in believing that simply with the election of the right individual as president, the right liberal or conservative, a new era will begin. Thus the president’s every move and utterance is scrutinized, magnified, and broadcast across the land—and a president’s power is enormous and a few words may indeed have far-reaching consequences. But there is often a disconnect between populist promises and expectations generated by candidates’ obligatory democratic rhetoric suffusing campaigns and the structures of governance standing apart from the presidency.

Take the issue of “partisan gridlock in Washington” as addressed by candidates from the early primary season through the 2008 election. Most candidates, including Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Obama, promised to “fix Washington,” or “reach across the aisle,” or bring a new spirit of conciliation to governing. Certainly a new administration can bring to bear in its dealings with the opposition a fresh tone of civility and willingness to negotiate. But both candidates and media coverage routinely ignore the structural changes in Congress, for example, that have increased hyperpartisanship.

In the 1970s, Democratic reformers in the House enacted new rules that undermined two-party negotiation as well as seniority and shifted the emphasis to party loyalty. Thus, if committee chairs want to stay in power, they need to toe the party line. As seniority declined, party discipline flourished. When Republicans took over Congress in 1994, they made further rules changes and enforced party discipline with a vengeance. Meanwhile, personal friendships among legislators have declined as they return to their districts more frequently. Television coverage prompts congressional orators to declaim in a more confrontational partisan vein, and outside pressure groups and lobbyists often work against compromise. Beyond these Beltway-based causes of rigid partisanship, the rise of overtly partisan media on television, radio, and the Internet have promoted ideological division in the electorate and Congress. Even the so-called mainstream media tend to undermine bipartisanship by their preference for covering or even encouraging conflict.Footnote ¹⁹

Not least of the structural inducements to partisan militancy springs from gerrymandered safe seats for House incumbents with district lines drawn that defy geography, common sense, and community and that elect Republicans or Democrats by large margins. All of Congress’s history shows that representatives from districts that are competitive are the most willing to compromise.

Populist expectations are imbedded in our political culture. The theory of the people’s sovereignty and democratic rhetoric constantly proclaims that the “the people’s will” shall or should prevail. These bedrock assumptions will continue to shape political campaigns. As certainly the tension between the ideal of “rule by the people” and the reality of rule by elected and unelected elites is likely to continue.