The Democrats' New Red Meat

摘要

Even before howard dean began his stump speech, be-fore he thrashed President Bush for giving tax cuts to "Ken Lay and the boys at Enron" (a jab he repeated three times), Dave Pitz, a retired teacher sitting in the audience in Newton, Iowa, had the message down cold. "Bush has become the CEO of corporate America," Pitz told me matter-of-factly. A central question of the 2004 campaign is whether enough voters agree with Pitz that Bush is a fiscally reckless president devoted not to them but to wealthy special interests. If the issue is framed that way and the frame sticks, a responsible populist message could work, though it would be the first time in modern political history that it did so. The Democratic candidates differ little on domestic issues. Theirs is essentially a contest to see which one has the best variation on that theme.