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WASHINGTON — In the days after Republican Scott Brown’s U.S. Senate victory Jan. 19 in Massachusetts, President Barack Obama shed his dispassionate style and substituted a more populist approach.
He complained that banks and financial institutions on Wall Street caused last year’s financial collapse because of “huge, reckless risks in pursuit of quick profits and massive bonuses.” He told a crowd in Elyria that he was not “going to have insurance companies click their heels and watch their stocks skyrocket” because of lack of federal supervision.
And during his State of the Union address Wednesday, Jan. 27, Obama assailed a court ruling on campaign finance, saying he did not “think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities.”
The “us-against-them” salvos from Obama were a sharp departure for the president who at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston pronounced “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.”
Yet in the wake of Brown’s victory over Democrat Martha Coakley, politicians from both parties are showing that populism once again is vogue, with Democrats hoping to inject a spark of life into their deflated progressive voters, while Republicans seek the support of anti-tax Tea Party activists.
“It keeps popping its head up,” said Ray Price, who served as a speechwriter for President Richard Nixon. “It has long been a part of our politics and not a very savory part.”
In Ohio, the late Democratic Sen. Howard Metzenbaum made a career out of bashing large profits by the oil companies, while U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Cleveland, has been ritually re-elected by asserting that the time has come to break “the chains ... which the health insurance companies have on our political process.”
Republican gubernatorial candidate John Kasich also plays the populist card, as he did last summer when he complained “we’ve relied too much on special interests.” During his unsuccessful run for the presidency in 2000, Kasich said “it’s time to take the power back from the elite and put it back into the hands of the American people.”
Last week as the Senate confirmed Ben Bernanke for a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, the progressives and conservatives attempted to out-compete each other for who could most vigorously denounce the architect of last year’s bailout of the financial industry.
Yet even as Price contended that “it works, unfortunately,” others suggest that populism is not a winning message at a time when unemployment is above 10 percent and angry voters want results, not impassioned speeches.
“Rhetoric is not going to trump the reality of people’s unemployment,” said Mary Anne Marsh, a Democratic consultant in Boston. “All the rhetoric about fighting and being on your side will fall on deaf ears. The only thing people want to see is a job. It’s that simple.”
America has had a long history of populist appeals as politicians try to persuade voters that they are on the side of the ordinary citizen against the powerful elite, with none more famous than William Jennings Bryan, who during his unsuccessful 1896 campaign for the presidency attacked the gold standard with the famous line, “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”
But others who have tried the populist approach, particularly nationally, have tended to fail.
During his 2000 acceptance speech, Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore assailed “big tobacco, big oil, the big polluters, the pharmaceutical companies, the HMO’s. Sometimes you have to be willing to stand up and say no — so families can have a better life.”
Yet during a year when the economy was growing and the nation at peace, Gore lost a disputed, close election to Republican George W. Bush. And analysts point out that Bryan lost three presidential elections, including two to Republican William McKinley, the antithesis of a populist.
“It’s an aberration; I do not think it is a consistent political philosophy,” said William J. Green, a Republican consultant in Pittsburgh. “This will be temporary. When you have half of Americans invested in Wall Street, they want Wall Street to succeed.”
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