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.

As the writer Wallace Stegner observed, the rural Northeast is the prelude to the American West, and you could argue that the paradox of Delaware County rewrites itself in blazing letters over and over again across the Great Plains and the Mountain West. Nobody thinks it’s strange that Nebraska and Nevada and Arizona and Montana vote for right-wing Republicans in election after election, consumed with tax-cutting fervor and a passion to shrink the government, even though it’s the massive federal programs of the 20th century — dams and aqueducts, agricultural subsidies, public lands thrown open to ranching and mining and lumbering — that supports those states’ economies to this day.

And as low-tax, free-market economic orthodoxies have bankrupted family farmers, sucked the life out of almost every small-town Main Street and displaced high-wage workers to Wal-Mart jobs, voters have flocked back to the Democrats, right? Well, not exactly. As cultural critic Thomas Frank observes in “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” — his dyspeptic tribute to his home state — worsening economic conditions on the Midwestern plains have only driven voters further to the right, into grass-roots antiabortion activism, campaigns against the teaching of evolution, obsessions with cultural indecency and other largely symbolic crusades. The result has been an entire region of the country dominated by an energized, rejuvenated Republican Party that represents the material interests of the powerful and the cultural obsessions of the powerless, that thumps the Bible with one hand and shreds the tax code with the other.

So much has been written about the blue state-red state divide in the last four years that it may seem it has been with us forever. To read the words of David Brooks, the Homer of this quasi-specious conflict, one might think that the latte-swilling, Volvo-driving liberals of the Northeast and the plainspoken, barbecue-chompin’ conservatives of the heartland were ancient tribes, sundered from each other and implacably opposed since the Peloponnesian War. (And of course, in Brooks’ worldview, the homespun, unassuming tastes of the latter group are presumed to be normative. Hence, George W. Bush deserved to win the 2000 election because he carried the states where real Americans live.)

For Frank (previously the author of “The Conquest of Cool” and “One Market Under God”), what happened in Kansas — and the rest of middle America — was in no way natural or inevitable. He sees the conservative hegemony in the Sunflower State and elsewhere in the heartland as a unique product of Republican ingenuity, Democratic inefficacy and the region’s innate tendency toward rebellion. Most of all, he believes the question of red and blue reflects the great unmentionable in American politics: social class. When the Democrats dropped any pretense of the working-class populism that had defined their decades-long reign as the majority party of the New Deal, veering first left (under George McGovern) and then right (under Bill Clinton) in search of various patchwork electoral coalitions, a vacuum was created at the grass-roots of American politics.

In the post-Reagan era of Rush, Hannity and O’Reilly, the right has filled that vacuum expertly. Its commentators and candidates have channeled the old working-class resentment against bankers and corporate fat cats into mistrust of an even more shadowy enemy, the “liberal elite” who are responsible, it seems, for mealy-mouthed P.C. rhetoric, foulmouthed rap music, Hollywood movies, teenage sex, school shootings, man-bashing feminism and a laundry list of other social ills, real or imaginary. (As Frank details, the conspiratorial fringe of the populist right buzzes with entertaining theories: Next the liberals plan to ban red meat, prevent white men from breeding, give entire Midwestern states back to the Indians.)

Frank borrows his title from an 1896 screed by Emporia, Kan., newspaper editor William Allen White, who was excoriating his fellow Kansans, believe it or not, for being too far left. That was the year of the legendary presidential contest between Republican William McKinley, who forthrightly represented the big-money interests of the Northeast, and firebrand Democrat William Jennings Bryan, who was, impossibly enough by today’s standards, a left-wing populist and a fundamentalist Christian. It was almost a photographic negative of the 2000 election: The inflamed rabble of the plains states flocked to Bryan, but the population centers of the East Coast turned out for McKinley, the sober voice of capitalism. (He was elected, and later assassinated by an anarchist — don’t let anybody tell you America was a more orderly place.)

As Frank writes, turn-of-the-century Kansas was a hotbed of “religious fanatics, crackpot demagogues, and alarming hybrids of the two.” Abolitionist John Brown was a Kansan, and Prohibition leader Carry Nation lived there. But more than anything else, Kansas was known for its “periodic bouts of leftism.” In Crawford County, Kan., a socialist newspaper had hundreds of thousands of readers, and it was among a handful of counties in the nation to go for Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs in the presidential election of 1912. Kansas had been an ornery place, fueled by ideology, from its very inception — the state was founded by Eastern abolitionists and “free-soilers” as a bulwark against the spread of slavery.

Frank’s freewheeling examination of how and why the left-wing economic populism of the 1890s was transformed into the right-wing cultural populism of today is hilarious, angry and often riveting. It ranges from history to sociology to memoir to old-fashioned street journalism, and despite what you may have read in a thoroughly disgraceful New York Times review, Frank does not mock his fellow Kansans for their political beliefs. If anything, he is awed and amazed by the right-wing activists he meets on his visits home, highly principled and selfless people who have sacrificed much to fight for causes and policies that (he believes) will prove immensely destructive to their own way of life.

Frank is indeed angry that the proud progressive traditions of Kansas have been subverted. And he is angry at America for fostering a political debate that has increasingly become a style competition, a contest to determine which ultra-rich prep-school candidate can strike the most “authentic” pose. But he does not direct his rage at the impassioned (if perhaps misguided) working-class citizens of Kansas. He is angry at the hypocritical Republican politicians who have shamelessly manipulated the politics of class, at the spineless Democratic politicians who seem to have abandoned the struggle for working people, at the media who have compulsively oversimplified the conflict and relied on Brooksian stereotype.

I have certain misgivings about “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” Frank barely touches on racial politics and the role of working-class white resentment in discussing the birth of the “Reagan Democrat” and the spread of the conservative backlash. That may not have been a crucial factor in Kansas, but it certainly played a central role in the South and elsewhere. I think he misjudges the danger posed by the antiabortion movement, and the passionate conviction of its activists. (He sees it as largely symbolic and not seriously devoted to the overthrow of Roe vs. Wade.)

But this book is a serious, daring and largely convincing exploration of a question most commentators approach with facile generalities: How did the right conquer middle America and turn the region’s populist heritage to its own ends? If Frank is even half right about how and why this happened, the Democratic Party faces much bigger challenges than its quadrennial struggle to triangulate some tedious Kennedy clone into the White House — in a vast swath of the country, it has lost its only viable constituency, and is in danger of extinction.

Although he’s originally from Mission Hills, Kan., in the affluent western suburbs of Kansas City, Frank lived most of his adult life in Chicago — where he founded the Baffler, the idiosyncratic left journal — until his recent move to Washington. When I spoke to him by telephone, he was visiting his mother on the North Side of Chicago, and began excitedly describing his recent trip to Kansas, where the new book, it’s safe to say, has gotten some attention.

I understand you’ve been packing 300-seat auditoriums, turning people away in Wichita and Kansas City.

These people, so far, are highly enthusiastic. I’ve only had one angry conservative show up, and he was a member of the media. The newspapers there are hopping mad about it. They do not address the substantive issues I raise, they just insist that I am insulting to Kansans. Well, here they are! They’re at my reading and they don’t seem to think that. I’m getting tons of e-mails from people in Kansas, telling me this is their life story. It’s very weird for me.

Well, I assume anyone in Kansas who isn’t a right-winger would be pretty excited about this book.

There are Democrats in Kansas. There just aren’t very many of them. I’ve now met many Democratic politicians. The former mayor of Topeka, the current mayor of Lawrence.

Well, does the response you got out there change your views any? In the book, you forecast a pretty grim future for Kansas politics.

Yeah, well there’s a guy who is running against [right-wing Republican Sen.] Sam Brownback. He’s very confident he’s going to beat Brownback. That’s probably optimistic, but he tells me every farmer he talks to is angry as hell. All these people I talk to agree with the central thesis, that the populist spirit out there has been hijacked by Republicans with these cultural issues, and we’ve got to get people back on track. Now this is in Wichita, which is going through terrible hard times right now, so there are a lot of people who are receptive to what I’m saying.

Is the Iraq war, with its endless amount of bad news, changing the equation for anybody you meet in Kansas?

You know, the war in Iraq did not come up. That did not seem to be a big issue for these people. That’s kind of predictable; the issues that people debate out there tend to be domestic. The Republicans aren’t talking about foreign affairs, they’re talking about the arrogant college professor who’s telling you that evolution is true, even though you don’t believe it. People mentioned the war in Kansas City, but that’s an urban area that’s more tuned in to the national media.

One of the strongest portions of your book is when you reveal that you understand the conservative backlash because you were part of it. It takes a big man to admit to having been a teenage Reaganite.

[Laughter.] What’s really funny is that the transition that I made — I wrote this entire book about how material self-interest has been submerged in this culture. If you think about it, it would’ve been much more in my interest, coming out of college, to be on the right. If I had stuck with it, I’d be sitting pretty today. Think about the right-wing magazines that are similar to the Baffler. There’s a libertarian magazine, same cut size, publishes articles of about the same length. It’s edited by quality people, they do a good job. Their circulation is smaller than ours, but everybody that works there has healthcare and generous salaries.

A welfare system for libertarians.

Yes! They go in and out of the think-tank world and the political world. I mean, they just go from one cushy gig to the next.

You quote this great piece of graffiti from your hometown that sums up the late-’70s backlash: “Russia Iran Disco Suck.” And then you provide the corollary to that, to explain the way you felt at the time.

Yes. As sucks disco, so sucks Iran and communism. As rocked Van Halen, so rocks Ronald Reagan.

OK, this is a dumb question, but given your personal feelings about Reagan, did you have any emotional or visceral response to his death?

Well, I never like media frenzies. Those are annoying. But yeah, there was a little bit of wistfulness, and I’ll describe it to you. I was watching TV and they were running a lot of news footage from that era, the late ’70s and early ’80s. It was images of the fabled Reagan Democrats, you know, blue-collar guys voting for Reagan. I was thinking about the world that those guys came out of, where 20 percent of the private-sector workforce was in a union, and blue-collar people could live next door to white-collar people. The gap between the social classes wasn’t that huge. They loved that world so much, they loved that affluent society. They voted for this candidate who evoked it so well, who talked about it so beautifully. And he killed it. Conservatism killed that world. It’s so sad. It’s just tragic. What’s that old term? One of the great ironies of American history. But this is way beyond irony. It’s tragedy.

You’re very critical of the whole red state-blue state paradigm that has obsessed us since the 2000 election. Explain what your problem is with it.

Well, there are three things. First of all, the model is politically motivated. It’s not real sociology. Second of all, it’s very easy to punch holes in it. And third of all, it has a grain of truth to it, that Americans really do need to talk about.

It’s of a piece with all the Republican efforts over the years to describe themselves as a party of the working class. You start with Nixon’s evocation of the “silent majority.” This has basically been the bread and butter of Republican appeals to the blue-collar voters ever since the ’70s. Think of Newt Gingrich talking about “normal Americans,” or Ben Wattenberg’s book “The Real Americans.” This is a way of talking about social class without actually talking about class. The people in the red states voted for us, therefore we’re the party of the working class. People out in the heartland are our voters.

As for punching holes in it, think of the way people in the blue states are always described. Illinois is a blue state, it went very heavily for Al Gore. You know, they say blue state people drive Volvos and sip lattes and eat sushi and all this sort of thing. And I’m like, “Uh, no, they don’t.” I lived on the South Side of Chicago, which went for Gore by 80 percent. You can’t get sushi there! I knew one guy with a Volvo and he got it used — it was all beat to hell! It’s not that kind of place. Think about people who live in Baltimore, people who live in Iowa. People who live in Kansas City, Kan., which is one of the two counties in Kansas that went for Gore. It’s one of the most working-class areas of the state.

When you’re trying to make a political stereotype seem like sociology, you say all sorts of silly things. David Brooks, for example, has a lot of ways of dividing the two colors. One of them is that red-state people are supposed to be so earthy that they know what soybeans look like, growing in a field. Blue-state people are not supposed to know about that. But if you look it up, the three states that grow the most soybeans are Illinois, Iowa and Minnesota. All blue states! It’s just stereotypes. It’s just stuff these people invent. Sometimes these commentators will come right out and say, yes, I am talking about social class. Rich people are snobs who vote for Al Gore, and poor or working-class people are down-to-earth folks who see that George Bush is one of them.

David Brooks says affluent suburbs everywhere voted for Al Gore, and it’s just not the case. There are affluent areas that voted for Gore — we all know that’s true. But not all, and probably not even half, although I don’t know how you would measure that. Even the examples that he gives are wrong, like the North Shore suburbs of Chicago. The really affluent suburbs went for Bush, voted Republican, like they always do.

And then there’s the grain of truth: There is a dramatic reversal that we need to talk about. If you compare it to the electoral map of 1896, when you had a genuine liberal Democrat, William Jennings Bryan, against somebody who openly was the voice of industry and the voice of the capitalist class, William McKinley, the picture was reversed. The heartland, the Midwestern states, went for Bryan en masse, and so did the South. Today these self-same places have switched sides.

That was the election where the populist language was being thrown around. What’s the stupid poem about Bryan by Vachel Lindsay? “Smashing Plymouth Rock with his boulders from the West.” That’s where all our imagery about who the producers are and who the parasites are — that’s where it all comes from. Compared to that, there has been a remarkable shift. So the question of what happened to liberalism in the Midwest is a really good question. We should be thinking about that.

Essentially, you’re arguing that the polarities have shifted, but the dynamic is the same. The Great Plains states are in rebellion against what they perceive as an oppressive power. That hasn’t changed.

Right, it’s the same. The populist spirit is aflame in Kansas, there’s no question about it. And elsewhere in the Midwest, and all across the country. That’s what the right-wing backlash is all about, harnessing that language of populism and that class anger, but appealing to it in cultural terms rather than economic.

So the perceived oppressor is no longer the capitalist class.

Right, it’s the liberal elite. Nobody ever goes out and gives that a solid definition, it’s another stereotype. But what that means is professionals and people with advanced degrees. That’s the liberal elite.

As you frame it, there’s this alliance between the blue-collar workers and the capitalist elite, in which the former — in political terms — are eagerly sacrificing themselves for the latter.

That’s a very good description. It’s an alliance between the money wing of the Republican Party and the foot soldiers who provide the vote; the rank and file who win the elections for them.

There’s an element of this that is primarily psychological, or, to use a dangerous liberal-elite word, semiotic. You argue that American politics has become a struggle over the idea of “authenticity.”

This is one of the themes that comes up in my other books. Authenticity is the name of the game in the advertising industry and the world of consumer goods. People have been convinced since the 1960s that they inhabit a fake world where everything is plastic and computer-generated and air-conditioned. The idea of the falseness of mass society, as I wrote in “The Conquest of Cool,” has become a perma-critique that has been embraced by the advertising industry. Think of the millions of products that are sold with the promise of authenticity, from Starbucks to microbrewed beer. Now Budweiser and Miller are counterattacking; which one of them has the slogan “True”?

This is also how the Republicans sell themselves. They are the voice of authentic Americans, and liberals are in some way deracinated, effete, devitalized, affected, arrogant. David Brooks has a survey where he claims if you poll liberals they like to show off. I don’t know where you get a survey like that.

And when you have this contest over who is more authentic, the educated classes are always going to be on the defensive, right?

They’re always going to lose. They don’t have a prayer in this contest.

It’s like they buy into this too. You know, we see John Kerry on the news, pretending to go out duck-hunting. Who is he kidding?

Yeah. Have you noticed that the Republicans are going way out of their way to talk about Kerry’s yacht, and the fact that he speaks some French. Whereas Bush is supposed to be a man of the people. By what criteria is this one guy different from this other guy, in any essential way? They’re both from almost precisely the same exalted quarter of American life. They’re even both members of the same secret fraternity. The fact that we are so obsessed as a society with images rather than substance — and I’m falling back on cliché here — is one of the reasons why the Republican appeal to authenticity works. It’s one of the reasons they have been able to convince voters to overlook their material interests.

One of the things that might surprise people is that when you go out to Kansas and meet these real working-class, right-wing foot soldiers, these antiabortion activists, these anti-evolution people, you don’t dislike them. In fact, you have a certain kind of admiration for them.

Yeah! When I had my colleagues here in Chicago read it, that was something they picked up on right away. Instead of really lambasting these people, who I obviously disagree with, I’m, you know, attracted to them. I think that’s really obvious.

They really see themselves as crusaders, and in this funny way they’re attaching themselves to the history of the left. It’s remarkable how often the antiabortion movement compares itself to the abolitionist movement. They all want to be John Brown, which maybe is specific to the history of Kansas.

That has a particular resonance in Kansas. I mean, it obviously has a resonance everywhere. Slavery was a horrible crime that nobody today is willing to countenance. But Kansas was basically founded as part of that fight, as a free-soil state. Everybody in Kansas knows that. When you go to elementary school in Kansas, that’s one thing you come away knowing. They don’t talk about Populism. They sure don’t talk about the fact that we had a socialist newspaper published in Kansas at one time. But they do talk about John Brown.

You have a whole critique of pop culture that is difficult to summarize, but let’s talk more about your sympathy with the right-wing activists. When they bemoan how coarse and cheap pop culture has become, you almost seem to agree, or at least to feel that they have a certain kind of point.

Well, look. I should say this: I started out as a punk rocker, and we try to deal with cultural dissent, genuinely shocking things, at the Baffler. But as I have written about many, many times, so much of the shockery that surrounds us is not genuine. There’s no avant-garde about it. It’s not the real thing, it’s a watered-down capitalist projection. You’ve seen this argument before, “the commodification of dissent.”

The argument I’m making is not that they’re absolutely right to be disgusted by our culture — although when I’m away from the country and I come back and turn on MTV, I’m always like, “Holy shit!” I’m just trying to play up the flagrant contradiction. If you hate this stuff, talk about capitalism! Talk about the forces that do it! I’m focusing on the contradiction there, rather than accepting their argument about obscenity or whatever.

Right, so your real problem is with the kind of cultural-studies intellectual who believes that pop culture really is subversive.

Yes, exactly. The cultural studies people read these products of capitalism as face value. They see fake rebellion as the real thing. To put it in very vulgar terms, that’s the argument.

Madonna kissing Britney is somehow actually socially meaningful.

Right, exactly. And the heartland people often see it that way also. I’m saying it’s not that, it is as pure an expression of business rationality as is a McDonald’s hamburger. This is where I stop being a partisan of one side or another and I’m purely talking about history, and, if you’ll forgive me, about social science. We have to understand the way capitalism works and what it does. And that is a subject that is so shrouded in mystification and invective by both the cultural-studies people and their great enemy, the Christian right. Both sides are saying these things are subversive, and I’m saying it just isn’t that way.

In some ways, these two movements are weird mirror-images of each other. Because the right-wing backlashers understand themselves as people without agency in the world. They can’t ever win, the culture industry never listens to them, and they’re surrounded by subversion. And the cult-studs people say everyone has agency, especially when they consume these “subversive” products.

You blame the Democratic Party, to a significant extent, for its own predicament in places like Kansas. You use the phrase “criminally stupid” to describe its strategy and tactics since the 1970s. Explain what you mean.

There are two different errors that were made, and both of them have amounted to jettisoning the working class, so that the working class is no longer the central focus of the party. In the McGovern era they described this as the “new politics.” The error of that was apparent at the time, because McGovern went down in flames. The idea was, we’ll build a new coalition around students, feminists, environmentalists and so on.

The Democrats are forever trying to come up with some kind of demographic coalition that will get them to 51 percent. They talk about that all the time. That was one of the first efforts to do that, and it was discredited really fast. But the Democratic Leadership Council is, I think, a far more poisonous purveyor of this idea, getting rid of the working class. Or not getting rid of them, but no longer appealing to them as the center of the coalition, the bulwark of the party. Instead, it’s suburban professionals or whoever.

Bill Clinton is, in their minds, the great success story for this strategy. He signed off on NAFTA, on welfare reform, on so many other Republican issues. He basically accepted the Reagan agenda on economic issues, whether it was deregulating the banks, doing away with New Deal farm policy, doing away with welfare, deregulating telecom, free trade. In all those ways, he was essentially a Republican. But he fought it out very vigorously on the cultural issues. And according to the New Democrats, this is the way to do it.

They point to Clinton and say, “Look, we won the presidency! We won twice! Therefore this is a great strategy.” And I would point out that while they won the presidency, they are no longer the majority party, either in Congress or the nation. That is a staggering reversal. Look, when you and I were growing up, the Democrats were always the majority. It was the party of the working class. Duh! It was the party of the majority. I thought the day would never come that they were no longer in that position. Now, I believe Republicans actually outnumber Democrats in registration. That is staggering.

It has happened because of this strategy. You take people who would be natural Democrats — because they work in industry, they’re blue-collar people — and you suddenly remove the economic issues from the table. You say, well, the Democrats are the same as the Republicans on those issues now. And all that’s left for them to consider are the cultural issues.

I talked to several people in Wichita — I quote one of them in the book — who come right out and say, “When the Democrats went with NAFTA, they no longer had anything to offer me, and I started voting Republican.” That is a catastrophe.

A friend of mine pointed out that when the Democrats decided they would no longer contest these elections on economic issues — of course none of these blanket statements are 100 percent true. There are still Democrats who do fight it out on economic issues, and they tend to do all right.

I guess John Edwards would be this year’s example.

Yeah, or Howard Dean. They both talked old-school populism. I thought Edwards was great. At least the way he talked was great. Kerry is trying to talk that way now, but it’s not as persuasive coming from him. Anyhow, my friend pointed out that when you drop the economic issues, and when the nation’s politics are about culture, it pushes down voter participation. Look at the 1920s, when both parties agreed on the economic issues and the fights were about Prohibition and Americanism and these other silly issues that are nonetheless precursors to the things we fight about today.

There are only two natural positions in a two-party system. One party is going to be the party of money, and the other party is going to be the party of numbers. You can only be one or the other, and the Republicans have pretty much got the money sewn up. The Democrats decided, when they made this jump to fighting the culture wars only, that they were essentially giving up on being the party of the majority. They want to contest for the money as well.

They want to be the other party of money.

Yeah, that’s right. They want to switch places with the Republicans. This is disastrous! It’s a bad idea!

This leaves the Republicans as A), the only party with a grass-roots movement at its base, right? The Democrats haven’t had that for decades.

They have little fragmented movements here and there. The labor movement is still out there. It’s not as strong as it was, but it still exists.

Yeah, and the environmentalists, the black churches, the Deaniacs. None of those things can be described as the base of the Democratic Party. And B), it leaves the Republicans as the only party with a class-based appeal to working people.

Exactly! That’s the critical point.

Maybe it’s a perverted class-based appeal, but …

That is the point of the book. There are several points I hope readers will come away with, but that’s the critical one. Democrats have to face up to that. They’re so afraid to talk about social class, and anytime they do the Wall Street Journal runs an editorial saying, “No class warfare! We can’t have class warfare in American politics.” And the Republicans do class warfare all the time. They talk about the liberal elite all the time. They’re forever attacking the tastes and habits of the rich.

This is where the Kansas example is so remarkable. The Kansas conservative leaders denounce rich people. They do it all the time. That neighborhood where I’m from, in Mission Hills. They forever lambaste people from Mission Hills! But then, think of what their policies are: They’re going to cut my taxes! Well, not me. My dad’s. Mine are negligible. But the policies they enact are going to make the people they denounce wealthier than ever. It’s an amazing thing, and it’s something the Democrats cannot grasp. The Republicans do talk about social class, and they are winning that battle.

Doesn’t this piss you off? The party that should be standing up for working people hasn’t been doing it, for the better part of 20 years?

I mean, in fairness, some of them do. But of course it pisses me off! I mean, yeah! I was doing a radio interview in Kansas when a Republican state senator phoned in. The host more or less recited my argument to her and said, “You represent a working-class district. And Tom Frank says the free-market policies you support are hurting your own constituents.” All she could say was, “Free-market policies — those are really mainstream. Everybody supports those.” I’m like, no they don’t. Maybe it’s mainstream now, but what about Franklin Roosevelt! Harry Truman! William Jennings Bryan! Our great heroes! Harry Truman was from Kansas City, for God’s sake. It’s not strange to have doubts about the free market.

You keep meeting these right-wing activists who are such striking and powerful characters. People with pretty extreme-right politics — they’re fighting to close abortion clinics, to ban the teaching of evolution or, you know, basically shut down the school system. And they’re remarkable people. They renounce prosperity and personal gain in favor of their idea of righteousness. They choose principle over their own personal interest.

In a different context, it would be very noble.

It’s inspiring, if a little bizarre. This used to be what people on the left did, right? Isn’t there a lesson we should learn from these people?

I hope so, yes. You’ve taken the words out of my mouth. What can I say? Of course we should learn from it.

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.

There you have it. Threshold credibility! Contrast that with Dean, who seems implausible to many as a commander in chief and who, as a campaigner, has shown an inability to keep a lid on it when he really needs to. Or compare it with Clark, who seems very plausible indeed as a commander in chief but seems painfully thin in the domestic area, and who has shown himself not quite ready for prime time on the campaign trail. Or with Edwards, who is a great campaigner, with a pretty good to excellent domestic agenda, but who falls short in the commander in chief department.

Looked at this way, Kerry, with threshold credibility in all three areas, is logically the guy Democratic primary voters would turn to as they move from protest to who-can-beat-Bush politics.

It seems possible — even likely — that Kerry will be able to parlay this threshold credibility advantage into enough support to get the Democratic nomination. But will that be enough for him to win the general election? Almost certainly not.

Credibility in these departments merely means voters will give him a careful look. He’ll still have to close the sale, and there are reasons to worry that Kerry has not yet found the themes and signature programs that will enable him to do so. Certainly his revival of warmed-over Gore-style populism does not augur well. Kerry has been putting this populism front and center in his recent campaign speeches, including his victory speech Tuesday night in New Hampshire:

“I have a message for the influence peddlers, for the polluters, the HMOs, the drug companies, big oil and all the special interests who now call the White House home: We’re coming. You’re going. And don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

Now, there’s a lot to be said for such a theme. As it was with Bill Clinton in 1992, it is probably an effective way to consolidate the support needed to get the nomination. And it can and should be an important part of the case to be made against George Bush in the general election campaign. Polls consistently show that Bush and his administration are viewed as being on the side of big corporations and the wealthy, not the average American. It would be political malpractice on Kerry’s part not to emphasize this.

But that emphasis — especially “the people vs. the powerful” rhetoric –shows what you’re against more than what you want to do. (Kerry would do well to borrow some of Edwards’ more optimistic approach as well as Edwards’ whole frame that Bush’s tax and other policies are a radical shift toward rewarding wealth instead of work.) To succeed, Kerry needs to get beyond populist critique to a positive, compelling vision of where he wants to take the country. Here are some ideas.

Start with the economy. Criticizing its shortcomings is fine and, even with the pickup in growth, there’s still likely to be plenty to find fault with in 2004. In all likelihood, the Bush administration will wind up presiding over a net loss of jobs — particularly manufacturing jobs — which is quite extraordinary by historical standards (not since the disastrous administration of Herbert Hoover, to be precise). But compared with the situation that helped doom Bush’s father’s reelection chances, both the unemployment rate and the level of economic pessimism are likely to be lower than they were in 1992.

Therefore, even more than Bill Clinton’s campaign in 1992, Kerry’s campaign has to be about the future of the economy and the country in general — a future that Republican policies have seriously compromised. As pollster Stanley Greenberg argues in his new book, “The Two Americas,” the future that would resonate most with American voters is an opportunity society of the type envisioned by the Democrats of John F. Kennedy’s era. Such a society would give everyone access to the resources and education to get ahead and would be radically counterposed to where Bush is taking the country.

Take the Bush tax cuts. The public has never been particularly enthusiastic about them, seeing them as only modestly helpful, if at all, to the average person and the economy as a whole. They are well aware most of the benefits flow to the well-off and outright rich. Evidence is strong that they would prefer seeing the money that now subsidizes the affluent used for public purposes in specific areas instead.

One area that immediately presents itself, especially given its clear connection to an opportunity society, is education. The Republicans’ program in this area is simple: mandating high standards through the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, while presiding over a stagnant federal education budget and dramatic education cutbacks in fiscally crunched states. That formula means states don’t have the money to help the many NCLB-designated failing schools, much less improve and modernize their school systems for the 21st century.

The public is well aware of this problem. Provided Kerry maintains the NCLB’s basic commitment to high standards and stringent accountability (“mend it, don’t end it”), he will find a receptive audience for proposals to give schools the resources they need to both meet current shortfalls and modernize for the future. Modernization could include universal access to preschool, keeping school buildings open all day and year-round for educational enrichment, and ensuring that all students can continue their education beyond high school. This, in turn, would mean substantial changes in the ways schools operate, recruit teachers and provide services. A modernization program on this scale will go far toward branding Kerry’s campaign as a campaign for the future.

The same focus on the future should inform his programs in other areas. In healthcare, while he will have a fat target in the recently passed Medicare prescription-drugs bill, he should resist the temptation to focus on the notorious skimpiness of the drug benefit. The worst crime of the bill is it does nothing to rein in runaway drug costs, whose escalation terrifies the senior citizens who need prescription drugs. (Indeed, that’s the main reason the bill manages to spend a fair amount of money — originally estimated at $400 billion over 10 years, and already that figure is being revised upward — yet achieve so little.) Similarly, the goal of extending coverage is a worthy one, but the typical voter already has health insurance and is most worried about the degrading quality and increasing costs (both premiums and out-of-pocket) of the policy they have. Modernizing the healthcare system in this country means, first and foremost, finding ways to keep healthcare costs under control. That, in turn, would help lay the basis for a model of fiscally and politically sustainable universal coverage, instead of simply adding another expensive entitlement to the current system.

Or take Social Security. The Republican plan to partially privatize the system by “carving out” a portion of the FICA tax to be put into individual investment accounts is a bad one, and support for it is quite soft, once the inevitable reduction in guaranteed benefits is brought to voters’ attention. But a defense of the Social Security system, while reasonable in and of itself, does nothing to modernize a pension system that leaves some workers without retirement accounts at all and others with multiple and underfunded accounts.

The most straightforward way to do this is to set up a universal pension system that would provide every worker with a fully portable retirement account. Under such a system, all the various IRA and related accounts would be rolled into one tax-favored account and workers could direct cash from any and all of their 401(k) accounts into this universal account, which would remain with them as they moved from job to job. As former Clinton economic advisor Gene Sperling advocates, these accounts could be further supported by providing up to $1,000 a year in matching contributions for savings deducted from paychecks — a one-to-one match for middle-income workers and a two-to-one match for lower-income workers.

Another issue Kerry should focus on is the environment and the need to safeguard it for future generations. This is an issue with strong appeal to key Democratic-leaning groups like professionals and the young. But it’s also an issue that gets a lot of moderate suburban swing voters hot under the collar. Polling consistently shows that voters think Bush has been doing a terrible job on the environment, trust the Democrats on the issue by wide margins, and vote heavily Democratic if it’s an important voting issue to them. The Gore campaign de-emphasized the issue in 2000, on the grounds that it wasn’t salient to enough voters. Kerry shouldn’t make the same mistake. The more he talks about it, the more salient the issue will become; the more salient it becomes, the better off his campaign will be.

Across all these issues, Kerry should highlight how his program for America’s future connects to a vision of an opportunity society where all Americans are provided with the tools they need to succeed, from adequate education to a reasonable level of health security to an effective way to save for their retirement.

How difficult would it be for Kerry to move in this direction? Not very. Many of his current programmatic proposals would fit right into the frame of an opportunity society — better, in fact, than they do into a simple populist frame, where they can more easily be typecast as just throwing more money at the middle class under the guise of “fairness.” For example, Kerry has some interesting ideas on education (including versions of universal preschool and access to college, and ways of fixing the NCLB) that tend not to receive much attention, but could be more energizing with an opportunity society approach. His proposals in other areas — with the exception of retirement, where he appears to lack any version of a universal pension system — are also consistent with the approach recommended here and would benefit from being reframed as providing more opportunity, rather than more fairness.

I can’t promise this approach will beat George Bush. But it’s got more potential to do so than “the people vs. the powerful.” Or (shudder) “the real deal.”

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.”

Hopping on the populist bandwagon, albeit a bit less gracefully, is Coleman, whose campaign pronouncements are peppered with rhetoric that could have been torn from a Eugene Debs stump speech: “Consumers and employees need the protection of the law against the greed and arrogance of the rich and powerful.” Coleman has also tried to align himself with the cause of cheated investors: “I was a prosecutor and I have looked into the eyes of people who lost their life savings to white-collar corporate crime. There should be no mercy for perpetrators of that crime.”

The two candidates have repeatedly crossed swords over who has the sleaziest supporters — always a recipe for real mudslinging, especially in a close race — each attacking the other for accepting donations from people associated with scandal-plagued companies. Call it Guilt by Contribution. Wellstone’s camp has slammed Coleman for raking in nearly $20,000 from corporations under investigation by Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission, including Citigroup, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Reliant Energy, and for pocketing contributions from individuals with ties to WorldCom, Global Crossing, and Arthur Andersen.

Coleman has returned fire by touting the fact that, as a gesture of contrition, he donated the money he got from Global Crossing executives to, among other charities, the National Latino Peace Officers Association — and by challenging Wellstone to do the same with money he received from Leo Hindery, the former CEO of Global Crossing.

Corporate connections have also played a central role in the Missouri Senate race, where Democrat Jean Carnahan, who currently holds the seat, is locked in a tight contest with Republican former congressman Jim Talent.

Carnahan and her supporters have drawn blood by playing up Talent’s most recent gig as a moderately talented $230,000-a-year corporate lobbyist, and by attacking his pro-fat-cat voting record while serving in the House — which includes his support of a federal loophole allowing super-rich Americans to renounce their citizenship as a way to avoid paying taxes. It doesn’t help Talent’s cause that during his time in Congress he was part of a group of young congressmen who dubbed themselves the “Lobster Tails” — renowned for dining out at fancy restaurants on lobbyists’ expense accounts.

In the finest tradition of American politics and schoolyards everywhere, Talent has responded to the attacks on his career as a lobbyist by finding a lobbyist of his own to smear — making mud pies out of the fact that Roy Temple, Carnahan’s chief of staff, worked as a lobbyist for MCI during the time it was acquired by the sleazoids at WorldCom.

Talent’s buddies in the Missouri GOP have also joined the fray, running TV ads attacking Carnahan as a hypocrite in populist’s clothing for having accepted campaign cash from executives at Global Crossing — including the ubiquitous Hindery — “who bankrupted the company and cost the employees their jobs and life savings.” The commercials fail to mention, however, that the Republican Senatorial Committee, which helped pay for the ad, also took money from Global Crossing. Maybe irony didn’t score well in the committee’s focus-group tests.

Deep in the heart of Texas, where Democrat Ron Kirk, the former mayor of Dallas, and Republican John Cornyn, the state’s attorney general, are vying to fill the seat of retiring Sen. Phil Gramm, the populist parade is also underway — with both candidates stumbling into potholes they’ve dug for themselves.

After all, it’s pretty hard to attack your opponent for being in the pocket of corrupt corporations, as both men have done, when you yourself are, well, let’s just say more than a little familiar with the linty interior of those very same cash-lined pockets. I mean, how ludicrous is it to see Kirk trying to capitalize on the fact that Cornyn accepted $193,000 from Enron over the course of his political career when Kirk himself spent much of the early 1990s lobbying for clients that included energy, tobacco and automobile companies — and fighting against such consumer-friendly causes as cleaner-burning cars and harsher penalties for businesses selling cigarettes to minors? It was no less ridiculous watching Cornyn trying to earn brownie points by donating an amount equal to his Enron haul to a fund that supports vanquished employees of the fallen energy giant — but only after months of steadfastly refusing to do so.

Kirk even gave a populist twist to the hot issue of invading Iraq when he questioned Cornyn’s full-throated support for sending troops, on the grounds that those on the front lines of the fight would be disproportionately ethnic and poor. “I would be curious to see,” Kirk said, “if we would go to war without any thought of loss if the first half-million kids to go came from families who made $1 million.”

I would bet we wouldn’t. As for me, I will be curious to see whether the outpouring of populist rhetoric from Campaign 2002 will translate into substantive populist reforms when the 108th Congress convenes in January 2003.

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?

I’m guessing this wasn’t what Case and Gerald Levin had in mind at that famous press conference — which now seems decades ago — announcing their great media colossus. Yet the prime placement given the greedy executives’ story shows just how fully it has captured the public imagination. Who needs Dr. Evil when you’ve got Ken Lay, Bernie Ebbers, Dennis Kozlowski and the seemingly endless Dickensian parade of other corporate villains?

Traditionally, declaring class warfare has been an ineffective political strategy in America — are you listening, Al Gore? Most Americans, rather than resent the wealthy, aspire to one day share their lofty status. It’s why this country’s ever widening division into two nations has had such little effect on Washington.

But Americans also have a deeply ingrained sense of fairness. The scandalous CEOs have pushed us too far — and are finally reaping the whirlwind of public fury.

Being rewarded — even over-rewarded — for a job well done is as American as rescued miners selling their stories to Disney. We don’t begrudge Vin Diesel his $20 million payday for “XXX 2,” and we even smile indulgently at the $250 million that A-Rod gets for playing baseball — it’s the genius of the market, we tell ourselves; it’s supply and demand. But making billions while your shareholders lose their shirts, and your workers lose their jobs, sticks in our craw.

The Fortune list of the Top 25 Cash-Out Kings tells the sorry tale of rapacious CEOs who, among them, pocketed an astounding $10.7 billion, and all while the companies they led crashed and burned. Singing the gospel of its newfound populist religion, Fortune, which spent the better part of the last decade exalting this same corporate culture, described the CEOs’ rampage as an obsession with becoming “immensely, extraordinarily, obscenely wealthy.”

CEO salaries went up 442 percent during the ’90s. In 1980, the average CEO’s compensation was 42 times the pay of the average blue-collar worker. In 1990, he made 84 times more than the blue-collar worker. In 2000, he made a staggering 530 times more. Meanwhile we have 8.3 million people out of work and millions of middle-class Americans whose retirement plans have shriveled away. This time, it’s not just the disenfranchised who are getting the short end of the economic stick. It’s Mr. and Mrs. Working Stiff.

Which is why the epidemic of infectious greed has the potential to ignite an explosion of populist outrage — one with the power to remake our democracy. The question is: Who will light the fuse?

Clearly not our leaders in Washington. Our elected representatives are so compromised, such an integral part of the scandal, that if they set off a populist petard, they’d only be hoisted by it themselves. Those in power have proven themselves chronically unable to bite the corporate hand that feeds and feeds and feeds them.

So, instead of real reform, we get watered-down initiatives, slap-on-the-wrist fines, showy arrests — and the “honey, come look at this” sight of Democratic Party chairman Terry McAuliffe attempting to ride the corporate scandals to a Democratic victory in November. That’s Terry McAuliffe, the same guy who turned $100,000 and his friendships with Bill Clinton and Gary Winnick into an $18 million windfall from the now bankrupt Global Crossing. The same Terry McAuliffe who earlier this month proudly unveiled the final drawings of the DNC’s new, state-of-the-art $28 million headquarters, financed entirely through massive — and soon to be illegal — soft-money donations. Not exactly the poster boy for populist outrage.

Among the biggest donors to the DNC building fund is Sen. Jon Corzine, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, who made a mint on Wall Street helping create some of the same banking and accounting schemes corporate America has been using to bilk and defraud shareholders. But now, of course, he’s a crusader for reform and a champion of the little guy. Or, at least, of those angry little guys who vote.

It’s astounding how brazenly these guys switch sides, as if all they have to do is change jerseys and we’ll believe they’re suddenly on our team. Watching Corzine and John Castellani, the president of the Business Roundtable, on “Meet the Press,” sternly wagging their fingers, I wondered: Where were they in the ’90s when, you know, all this was going on? After all, Fortune’s findings were based on an analysis of CEO stock sales filed with the SEC, filings available to anyone who chooses to look for them. Why weren’t they — and why, for that matter, wasn’t Fortune — crying foul about these things 10 years, five years or even one year ago? Were they unable to find the SEC in the phone book? Or were they too caught up in the irrational exuberance to notice?

As our collective anger collides head-on with our political system’s intransigence, we’re stuck with a classic case of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object. Something has got to give. In the past, it’s been us. But it doesn’t have to be.

We can’t count on a white knight riding to the rescue — although I have to confess to a hope-over-experience fantasy that John McCain will finally abandon his dollar-rich but morally bankrupt party and mount an Independent steed. But, other than that, look around at the political landscape — 100 senators, 435 members of the House, 50 governors. Is there anyone — anyone — who strikes you as capable of breaking the logjam, of tapping into the American people’s longing for fairness and justice and equity?

I hear silence. The spark will have to come from outside the political gene pool.

Will it be, say, a younger, charismatic Ralph Nader? A Ross Perot without the corporate baggage or bats in the belfry? A real-life version of Jimmy Stewart’s Jefferson Smith, who arrives on the scene funded by $1 donations from paperboys and soda jerks or, these days, video-store clerks and cubicle drones?

My guess is none of the above. Instead, it will be a critical mass of individuals and groups mobilized by the injustice given flesh and blood by the current scandals. This time we have a story to organize around, a story that has it all: narrative power, colorful crooks, sympathetic victims, juicy details (who can forget Kozlowski’s $6,000 shower curtain?), political intrigue, global fallout. A story so compelling that even our part-of-the-problem media giants can’t ignore it.

The scandal that is. The real solutions they’ll try to ignore as long as they can. But beneath the media radar screen, people are organizing across the country: from established organizations engaging in grassroots work like Public Citizen, Common Cause, Global Exchange, the Center for Public Integrity, the Pension Rights Center, Workingassetsradio.com, and United for a Fair Economy to younger groups like Citizen Works and Junction-City.com to Jim Hightower’s traveling road show, “The Rolling Thunder Down-Home Democracy Tour.”

“We have the chance,” Scott Harshbarger, president and CEO of Common Cause, told me, “of combining the traditionally disenfranchised with a new investor class that now sees pensions and college funds disappearing. This is a unique opportunity to organize and politicize them.”

While an over-reliance on market-based solutions may have gotten us into this mess, here’s hoping that the growing demand for fairer, saner, and more democratic answers for America’s problems may increase their supply.

We were told again and again during the ’90s that our unprecedented prosperity was fueled by consumer spending. Well, the time has come for these shoppers to leave the malls and take to the streets — to go from invigorating our economy to reinvigorating our democracy.

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.

Sure, a ski-masked anarchist trashing a Starbucks makes for a better front-page photo than a few thousand demonstrators peacefully protesting the subversion of democracy — but it was a classic case of reporters who can’t see the deforestation for the tree-huggers. So in the days following the Battle in Seattle, much was written about the “what” and very little about the “why.”

But the why is what we’re left with now that everyone’s gone home. The most significant aspect of the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle is that they embodied the widespread fears and anxieties of millions of Americans who do not share the prevailing assumption that these are the best of times, and who in effect represent America’s unrecognized third party, made up of those so disgusted with the system that they have even given up on voting.

Our leaders’ hubristic mindset can’t even conceive of protest amid a 4-percent unemployment rate and an 11,000-point Dow. Is that why the conference organizers and the local authorities were completely caught off guard by the level and intensity of the protests?

It’s not like they were a secret. They were more than eight months in the planning, discussed and developed through the Internet, announced in a full-page ad in the New York Times signed by 60 anti-WTO groups and preceded by a traveling caravan that visited 18 cities, holding teach-ins on civil disobedience before arriving in Seattle. Not exactly an underground operation.

The protesters left Seattle but very likely will take their message to the streets of Philadelphia and Los Angeles during the national party conventions, because last week proved that’s the only way they’ll be heard.

“We’ll be prepared for whatever demonstrators may be planning to do here,” says California Gov. Gray Davis. But maintaining law and order is one thing; responding to a fundamental challenge to the political order is quite another. Downplaying it is definitely not going to make it go away.

The emerging populist alliance cuts through both parties and across generations. It traces its roots not to the street protests of the ’60s but to the progressive reform movement of the ’90s — the 1890s. “The humblest citizen in all the land,” said populist William Jennings Bryan in his 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech, “when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error.” In “The Age of Reform,” Richard Hofstadter analyzes Robert La Follette’s watershed address in the U.S. Senate in 1908: “He attempted to prove, with careful documentation from the interlocking directorates of American corporations, that fewer than one hundred men, acting in concert, controlled the great business interests of the country. ‘Does anyone doubt,’ he asked, ‘the community of interest that binds these men together?’”

Protest organizer Mike Dolan drew similar distinctions. “The division that matters now is no longer between the two parties but between corporatists and populists,” he told Marc Cooper on Radio Nation. He defined “this historic confrontation” as one “between civil society and corporate rule.”

“This has not stopped our work,” said World Trade Organization director-general Mike Moore as the talks were collapsing around him. “Our working lunch went ahead as scheduled. The plenary will start at 3, as scheduled.” And they accomplished nothing — not as scheduled.

“The question is, who elected these 50,000 people out there?” asked Dan Griswold of the Cato Institute, clearly forgetting that protesters protest to keep in check the power of those elected. And, come to think of it, who elected the WTO bureaucrats?

The unchecked power of the few over the economic and political life of our nation — indeed, over the very lives of average Americans — was the target of both the turn-of-the-century progressives and the end-of-this-century’s protesters. If anything, the arrogance and incomprehension are even greater today.

There is no doubt that the authorities will be better prepared next time. There is also no doubt there will be a next time. The corruption of our system and the cluelessness of our leaders guarantee it.