It's clear:

Hillary Clinton is running as a populist.

From Wikipedia: (first sentence)

POPULISM

Populism is a discourse which supports "the people" versus "the elites".

And

Populism continues to be a force in modern U.S. politics, especially in the 1992 and 1996 third-party presidential campaigns of billionaire Ross Perot.

UPDATE (post bumped up): John Cole quotes someone who attended a Hillary rally:

In the hours following the speech, which was delivered before a pair of the largest flags I have every seen draped across the width of Main Street, I got more and more depressed. Not only did Clinton’s speech avoid anything remotely resembling a respect for the challenges and contributions that science poses and offers society, but she seemed to go out of her way to appeal to an anti-intellectual strain that her advisers must have told her holds sway in the largely Republican county in which she found herself.

The only common theme to emerge from the 30-minute ramble was an attack on our enemies. China is the enemy for selling us lead-contaminated toys and poison pet food. The Saudis are the enemy for exploiting our addition to oil. The rest of OPEC, too. And worst of all are those evil, parasitic “middlemen” who pop up in every corner of the economy, ready to take a cut and give back nothing.

Cole writes: (emp add)

Why doesn’t she just change her name to Huey Long? Seriously, though- when did this happen? I remember when Hilary was the detached policy wonk, who coldly and coolly analyzed problems, and now she has morphed into some unsophisticated bubba who hates the man, hates ideas, and hates everything but joe six-pack and his shotgun and coon hound.
...
She isn’t campaigning or trying to sell her ideas- she is publicly airing an enemies list.
...
A link to the OPEC suing nonsense. I can’t believe this is not getting more attention, it is so damned crazy.

Hillary's quote at the link:

“We’re going to go after OPEC which remember is a monopoly cartel. There's nothing free-market about it. They sit in some conference room a couple of times a year and decide how much oil they are going to produce and how much they are going to charge for it. So lets change our laws so we can sue them on anti-trust reasons.”

RELATED: Good cartoon on the gas tax proposal.


posted by Quiddity at 5/05/2008 02:08:00 PM