Word: populists
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...speech in Raleigh, N.C., Monday afternoon was any indication, though, it's not going to be a slam dunk. It's clear that Obama's economic policies aren't a continuation of the Bush era. But what they are remains a hard-to-summarize mix of moderate Democratic standbys, populist silliness and the occasional truly visionary proposal. They haven't coalesced into anything you could really call a rallying cry. Not yet, at least...
These add up to what you could call the stock Democratic response to tough times. They're not necessarily bad ideas, but they're not what you could call new or transformative either. Obama throws in a few populist panders - he favors a windfall profits tax on oil companies (which could discourage investment in new energy resources), and says he would oppose raising the Social Security retirement age (which if phased in over a long enough period would be the fairest, most sensible way to ease some of the system's long-run funding challenges). Near...
...internal tensions within the Obama campaign in this laundry list. His economic advisers are moderate, mostly free-market-oriented wonks. His campaign strategists would presumably love it if he breathed a bit more populist fire. And the candidate himself balances a lifelong devotion to progressive causes with what seems to be a pretty keen sense of the tradeoffs inherent in economics. All of which helps explain why, for the moment at least, Obama's most compelling economic argument remains the fact that, on the economy, John McCain sounds an awful lot like George Bush...
...Along with the growing cosmopolitanism of the wealthy and the professionals of the new economy, globalization has been accompanied by a surge in xenophobia. The phenomenon may have taken a graphically violent form in South Africa recently, but even in Europe the surge of populist xenophobia since the 1990s has propelled previously fringe groups such as the British National Party, Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front in France, neo-Nazis in Germany and the assassinated Pim Fortuyn's eponymous party in the Netherlands into the political mainstream. Last October, the Swiss People's Party won the largest single share...
...small, populist-flavored "Obama Rama" rally in a Billings city park in a low-income neighborhood Saturday, Obama superdelegate John Melcher, 84, a former U.S. Senator said, "I think this is the best campaign I've ever seen, except for John Kennedy's." He told the gathering he backs Obama because the Iraq war has drained assets better used elsewhere, and said he sees Obama as "a sound, qualified leader," who "has the capacity to draw good people to him, and to retain them...