From the Judge's Chambers: Two Speeches

By William C. Whitbeck Within the space of seven days, we Americans were on the receiving end of two superficially similar but substantively disparate speeches. One was President Obama's long-awaited jobs speech on September 8. Predictably, the President's address received a torrent of national media coverage, some worshipful, some ostensibly neutral, and a smidgen highly critical. The other speech was by Sarah Palin to the Tea Party of America rally in Indianola, Iowa on September 3. Again predictably, there was almost no national media coverage of that speech . . . with one singular exception. But that exception was in the nature of a minor miracle: a New York Times writer not only devoted a full column to Palin's speech but also, with admitted reluctance, concluded that she actually had something substantive to say. The Times writer, Anand Giridharadas, discovered, without ever using the word and to his own apparent surprise, that Palin really is a bone fide populist. Giridharadas outlined Palin's three primarily populist points: first, that a "permanent political class" now governs the United States; second, that the money government spends and the money big companies spend to influence the government are the lifeblood of this class; and, third, that "crony capitalism" is controlling the government and strangling the free market economy. Now, President Obama did give us a few head fakes in the direction of a populist appeal. He acknowledged that Washington hasn't always put the interests of average Americans first. He railed against corporate tax breaks and loopholes, saying that the tax code "shouldn't give an advantage to companies that can afford the best-connected lobbyists." He cited his old standby Warren Buffet in support of a tried-and true-tax "reform" proposal under which "everybody pays their fair share" . . .shorthand for taxing the rich. But these were merely riffs. The President's basic proposal was yet another stimulus, an overt exercise in Keynesian prime-the-pump economics. Palin came from an entirely different direction. After some partisan throat-clearing, she laid into Washington's permanent political class with notable ferocity. She said that: They talk about cutting government spending, and yet they keep spending more. They talk about massive unsustainable debt, and yet they keep incurring more. They spend, they print, they borrow, they spend more, and then they stick us with the bill. Then they pat their backs, and they claim that they faced and "solved" the debt crisis that they got us in, but when we were humiliated in front of the world with our country's first credit downgrade, they promptly went on vacation. And she wasn't finished. She was just getting warmed up. She lambasted Democrats and Republicans alike. She described crony capitalism as "the capitalism of connections and government bailouts and handouts, of waste and influence peddling and corporate welfare." She virtually accused the crony capitalists of owning Washington's permanent political class lock, stock, and barrel. She said we should unshackle corporations from the world's highest federal income tax rate, but then bluntly stated that they should stand or fall on their own, "just like all the rest of us out here on main street." This is old-fashioned, red meat populism, updated for the 21st Century. The last true populist on the national scene in this country was Andrew Jackson. William Jennings Bryan tried for the presidential brass ring three times but never made it, Huey P. Long was a regional figure, and Franklin D. Roosevelt was too much the patrician to qualify. Is it even remotely possible that Jackson's passionate convictions are now, across all these years, somehow stirring in the soul of Sarah Palin? In the most remarkable of places, the New York Times, Giridharadas hints at a most remarkable answer. Published: Thu, Oct 6, 2011