Interesting analysis from Noam Scheiber on Obama’s sorta-populist moment:

But there’s still another explanation, which has to do with racial stereotypes and double-standards. Simply put, a little-known African-American politician who dabbles in edgy populism risks alienating certain white voters, who will view his populism through the lens of race. However the candidate actually intends it, these voters will treat his rhetoric as evidence that he plans to take from white people and give to black people, and, needless to say, they’ll be nudged along in this assumption by the right-wing media. (Fox et al was pretty good at fanning these fears even when Obama’s rhetoric was about as far from populist as you can get).

Three years into his term, by contrast, most Americans have a fairly detailed portrait of the president. He’s no longer a black man they don’t know, but a person they have a relatively intimate relationship with, at least as public figures go. Many, if not most, probably don’t even think of the president in racial terms anymore.

Which is to say, Obama may have finally embraced populism because he finally can embrace populism, whereas it simply wasn’t politically possible before.

I think this is certainly a possibility, but…it’s not the simplest one, which is that the Democratic Party has a deep disdain for populism. To know why that is, I like to think about what would happen if the Democrats fully embraced an authentically populist approach as a party. This is impossible to predict, but I think the following four things would happen in short order:

1. Democrats would quickly increase their share of the fabled white, working-class vote by a decent margin.
2. Democrats would probably lose some percentage of the totebagger, Charlie Rose-viewer vote off the bat, though probably less on net.
3. The political establishment (and its political wing, the Blue Dog caucus) would go absolutely apeshit, attacking Democrats as reverting to the far-left McGovern days and such. Joe Lieberman would have a field day.
4. Corporate donations would fizzle, putting the party at (more of) a disadvantage when it comes to financing electioneering activities. And it’s hard to see how they make it up.

Now, I’m not necessarily certain that it’s not worth taking the plunge. In fact, post-Citizens United, I think it’s really the only choice. There’s a theory of politics (Jamie Court is pretty eloquent explaining  it) which basically states that the forces of reaction and propping up the status quo are always going to be better-funded than the ones arguing for progress, so instead of playing that game, you play a different one–use anger to mobilize people for change, to basically detonate existing points of pressure and then get out of the way. And this theory has a lot going for it: it’s essentially the dynamic that gets corporations to create safer products and designs a lot of the time, driving progress in that sphere. What’s more, it would effectively force Democrats to rely much more on strengthening unions to compete, which was really where I think the Democrats went wrong in the first place, in paying them lip service to get big corporate money.

But it’s unsurprising that a simple observer and activist would say, “Let’s do it!” while the people responsible for making the party a success do not. And it occurs to me that the Democrats can’t afford to become a populist-reformist party that only occasionally holds power for short periods of time to enact rapid bursts of change, when one considers the shambles that the would-be Republican Party of governance is in right now. There is, I think, little question that populism is a vastly more effective approach for Democrats operating outside of the Coasts. The establishment favored Blue Dog-ish Iraq Veteran Paul Hackett over liberal-populist Sherrod Brown for the Ohio Senate nomination in 2006, and Brown won a surprisingly wide victory that I strongly doubt Hackett would have enjoyed. Democrats strongly stood by doomed Sen. Blanche Lincoln in 2010 when polls showed that the populist alternative trailed by far less. Admittely, Lincoln was in incumbent, but there was no need to spend a single penny in favor of an unpopular, damaged incumbent who was obviously going to lose by Santorum margins in November. None of this is particularly new, and I’ve written about it before, but it still stands. It is my opinion that the Blue Dogs represent mostly the worst aspects of our establishment consensus–deficit peacockery, military hawkishness, wishy-washiness on social issues–but the reason they have stuck around is because the establishment provides them with enormous cover. The Democratic Party has come to rely on this dynamic. But it’s not a very strong foundation for a reformist party, in my opinion.