“Perfect populist pitch,” beamed CBS
analyst Jeff Greenfield right after Sarah Palin’s big speech at the
GOP fawnfest in St. Paul, Minn. “She’s a populist,”
echoed Karl Rove over at Fox TV.
Excuse me? Palin is to populism what near beer is to
beer, only not as close.
You want a taste of the real thing? Try this from
another woman who hailed from a small town and was renowned for her
political oratory:
“Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a
government of the people, by the people and for the people, but a
government of Wall Street, by Wall Street and for Wall Street. …Our laws
are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in
rags. …The people are at bay, let the bloodhounds of money who have
dogged us thus far beware.”
That, my media friends,
is populism! It comes from Mary Ellen Lease’s speech to the national
convention of the Populist Party in 1890. Lease spoke all across the land,
rallying a fast-spreading grass-roots revolt against the corporate
predators of her day. “Raise less corn and more hell,” she
urged farmers.
Populists don’t support opening our national
parks and coastlines to allow the ExxonMobils to take publicly owned oil
and sell it to China. Palin does. Populists don’t hire corporate
lobbyists to deliver a boatload of earmarked federal funds, then turn
around and claim to be a heroic opponent of earmarks. Palin did. Populists
don’t favor giving yet another huge tax break to corporations. Palin
does.
Another thing populists don’t do is sneer at
community organizers, as Palin did. Indeed, populists of old were community
organizers, as are today’s, helping empower ordinary folks who are
besieged by the avarice and arrogance of many of the corporations backing
Palin. Working for such needs as clean elections, environmental justice and
fair wages, community organizers embody the vitality of modern populism,
doing the essential grunt-level work of democracy. What gives Palin any
legitimacy to denigrate that?
This article appears in Sep 18-24, 2008.
