While President Obama has sounded clear populist themes with his “tax the rich” rhetoric, Clive Crook describes in the latest Bloomberg Businessweek why the Left is having a hard time building a winning hand around the populism card.
President Obama’s sounding off about Wall Street and inequality, and his call for higher taxes on the rich, get the Democrats only so far. An approach to taxes that Democrats advocate all the time is hard to sell as an urgent response to this particular crisis. It fails to target Wall Street malfeasance directly. Populism wants punishment. Injustice gets America’s juices flowing. Mere inequality, less so.
The Occupy movement, meanwhile, has tried to channel the righteous anger of Middle America, but it has no program. It’s too narrowly based to be populist, and too clueless to know where it’s heading. There are Tea Party candidates on ballots. There are no Occupy candidates. Scruffy, disorderly, and unserious, it can’t speak for the 99 percent. (“Mic check?…” Oh, please.)
Democrats have another weakness. A muscular liberal-populist response to the Great Recession would have to take on banking and finance much more aggressively. But Democratic politicians are equally complicit in the collusion between Wall Street and Washington. The Obama administration is populated by once and future investment bankers. And the President’s reelection depends on raising super-PAC money from some of the same fat cats it should be punishing.
