America may not have titled aristocrats, but it has always had patrician families, defined by a combination of wealth, educational affiliations and public service.  Today’s Republicans may sound like George Wallace in their denunciations of paper-pushing bureaucrats and pointy-headed intellectuals, but their presidential selection pool is a very selective country club.

Between 1980 and 2008, inclusive, there have been eight presidential elections.  The Republicans have nominated five presidential candidates — Ronald Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush and John McCain.  During the same time, the Democrats have nominated seven presidential candidates — Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry and Barack Obama.

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"Let me address that for a minute,” the Republican presidential candidate said, “because if you listen carefully, I’m very much involved with the 99. I’ve been condemning that 1 percent because they’ve been ripping us off --” He was interrupted again, this time by cheers, almost drowning him out.

After the usual chants of "We are the 99 percent" and "There are criminals on Wall Street who walk free," Paul quickly took back the audience, not that he had ever lost it. “Do you feel better?” he asked, to laughter.

“We need to sort that out, but the people on Wall Street got the bailouts, and you guys got stuck with the bills, and I think that’s where the problem is.”

It was a masterful performance. Ron Paul — fraudulent populist, friend of the oligarchy, sworn enemy of every social program since Theodore Roosevelt — had won the day, again.

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The changes that do take place are often the opposite of those that majorities of Americans want. Most Americans want Social Security to be strengthened and American manufacturing protected. But the conversation among elites inside the Beltway-New York bubble is about cutting Social Security and more one-sided "free trade" deals with mercantilist nations that, unlike the U.S., protect and promote their domestic industries.

Many Americans have come to the conclusion that nobody represents them in Washington anymore. They are right.

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The last realignment of the American party system took place in the 1970s, when the civil rights revolution along with the cultural revolutions of the 1960s blew apart the New Deal order that had coalesced in the 1930s. In the post-New Deal system that exists to this day, the Republican Party is a neo-Jacksonian coalition whose base consists of Southern white Protestants and, to a lesser degree, conservative white Catholic "ethnics" in the Northern suburbs. The Democratic Party is based in big cities and college towns. Among ethnic and racial groups, its most consistent electoral supporters are blacks and Jews, followed by Latinos.

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Knowing he needed to learn more about "the Tea Parties" before he wrote a Sunday newspaper opinion column all about them, Broder turned to American Enterprise Institute vice-president Henry Olsen, who is not affiliated with "the Tea Parties," but is a longtime conservative think tank fixture who recently wrote a lengthy piece on American populism for a largely unread political journal.

Yes, this member of the Washington conservative think tank elite will definitely help Broder understand what these "Tea Parties" are all about.

The history of American populism, according to Olsen as filtered through reflexive centrist Broder, is a history of two distinct sides, liberal and conservative, that were both unsuccessful not because of the merits of their ideas or the righteousness or destructiveness of their ideologies, but because they were both too extreme. The conservative populists became successful when Ronald Reagan appeared to move them toward the center. Once ideas are mainstream, they are good. Before they are mainstream, they are scary and bad and wrong. The end.

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It seems as if more and more decisions that should be made democratically are being shunted off somewhere to a few people who make them in back rooms. Which programs should be cut, which entitlements pared back, and what taxes raised in order to reduce the long-term budget deficit? Hmmm. Let’s convene a commission and have them decide.

Commissions are a default mechanism when politicians want to hand off difficult issues to "experts." But reducing the long-term budget deficit has almost nothing to do with expertise. It’s about our nations’ values and priorities. Nothing could be more central to the democratic process.

Democracy requires at least three things: (1) Important decisions are made in the open. (2) The public and its representatives have an opportunity to debate them, so the decisions can be revised in light of what the public discovers and wants. And (3) those who make the big decisions are accountable to voters.

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By itself, this would merely reinforce the identification of the Party Formerly Known as Lincoln's with the white South. But in a time of popular anger over banker bonuses and lobby-hobbled government, the themes of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian populism have appeal far beyond the Scots-Irish enclaves of the Appalachians and Ozarks. Witness the calls from Democrats as well as Republicans for President Obama to oust Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and pay more attention to Main Street than to Wall Street.

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Because, you know, Wall Street fat cats are really mad, and if we don't play nice, they're just going to pick up their ball and go home.

Exhibit A: From the Wall Street Journal, "On Wall Street, Talk of Trust and Civil War":

"Washington and Wall Street are the equivalent of Gettysburg and Antietam right now," said Glenn Hutchins, co-chief executive of private-equity firm Silver Lake.

"To point the finger at one group means, No. 1, you're not understanding the problem, two, you're stretching our social fabric thinly, and you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater," Mr. Hutchins noted. "Trust goes both ways."

Exhibit B: AIG trader Jake DeSantis' resignation letter, published as an Op-Ed in the New York Times, "Dear A.I.G. -- I Quit!:

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If nothing else, it flies in the face of a great many clichés. "The people have spoken." "The people are always right." "Government of the people ... by the people..." Well, you know the rest. Or maybe you don't. Because, according to Shenkman, Americans don't know a hell of a lot, and some of us are, by any available metric, D-U-M dumb.

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I was not a "Deaniac" in the 2004 election, but I must protest the way Brooks has used my research to support his claims. Democrats today certainly face challenges in building broad coalitions of educated professionals and populist supporters. But MoveOn and the Dean campaign have gotten more people involved, not fewer, in the party. Republicans, meanwhile, can hardly brag that they represent the values of ordinary Americans. Their effort to destroy the popular and inclusive Social Security program, a plan hatched by ultra-right advocacy groups and think tanks, is a textbook case of manipulative elitism and faux-populist conservatism.

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Another fact about this county won't surprise you at all, although maybe it should. Despite being an alarmingly depressed area smack in the middle of one of the bluest of all blue states -- with a truly alarming percentage of adults on government assistance -- Delaware County is bedrock Republican. George W. Bush got close to 70 percent of the vote here in 2000. Hillary Clinton swept to an easy statewide victory in the race for U.S. Senate that year, but her opponent, an undistinguished Republican congressman from Long Island named Rick Lazio, won 61 percent of Delaware County's votes. When we briefly considered living up here full time, we had to consider the fact that truly meaningful politics in Delaware County takes place inside the Republican Party. Being a registered Democrat up there is about as functional as voting Green or Libertarian or Socialist Worker.

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But he is an improvement over Howard Dean in the electability department. And despite the problems mentioned above, he probably also has an electability advantage over John Edwards or Wes Clark (though this is less clear).

To radically simplify, a presidential candidate needs to impress voters in three ways: as a commander in chief and defender of national security; as a steward of the economy and a custodian of the domestic agenda; and as someone who can connect with voters as he campaigns for the nomination. In each of those areas, Kerry achieves threshold credibility -- that is, he's good enough to make most voters give him a closer look without saying, "No way can I vote for that guy."

Instead, voters (at least our typical primary voters) might say: Kerry as commander in chief? He seems plausible. Kerry on domestic issues? Well, pretty good. He seems to know what he's talking about. Kerry as campaigner? Not exciting, sure, but at least he's disciplined and doesn't say a lot of goofy stuff.

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In Minnesota -- where Democrat Paul Wellstone, the incumbent, is being challenged by Republican Norm Coleman, former mayor of St. Paul -- the candidates are battling to see which can paint himself as more pro-little guy. It's become Populist vs. Populist. Or Populist vs. Populist vs. Populist, if you factor in Minnesota Green Party candidate and potential spoiler Ed McGaa.

It's a stance that comes naturally to Wellstone, who since 1990 has been the Senate's reigning crusader against corporate influence over public policy. His latest TV spots legitimately portray him as "one of the toughest watchdogs in Washington," a politician who has consistently "stood up to the most powerful interests to fight for people." "You've got to put people first," says Wellstone in the ad. "You've got to know whose side you're on."

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Intrigued, I clicked on the accompanying link and was transported to "The Greedy Bunch," Fortune magazine's exhaustive evisceration of America's most avaricious executives -- featuring blood-boiling stories such as "You Bought. They Sold." and "The Cash Out Kings."

Here was AOL, under SEC investigation for questionable accounting practices, eagerly redirecting me to AOL Time Warner's corporate sibling Fortune for a stinging exposé. And there, front and center among the greedy executives, was square-jawed AOL Time Warner chairman Steve Case. Who said synergy is dead?

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Their responses ranged from the platitudinous ("I support free and fair trade. And along with the president I have argued that labor rights and environmental protections should be a more important part of the negotiating process" -- Al Gore) to the painfully obvious ("I readily concede there may be an instant in time where someone has been pained by free trade" -- George W. Bush). And the award for meaninglessness goes to Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D. "The key," he said, "is not to run away from global trade but to embrace it while dealing with the negative aspects." The minority leader clearly has a great future as a marriage counselor.

Meanwhile, the media focused on the easy debate of whether the Seattle authorities were unprepared for the protesters (they were) and whether they subsequently overreacted (they did). In between, they giggled uncomprehendingly and made lame jokes about topless lesbian sea turtles.

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