I actually think Jon Chait goes too far here in declaring Clinton a conservative populist rather than a liberal populist. To put the two strains of thought in more specific terms, Chait is really talking about the difference between economic populism, which believes "the rich wield disproportionate influence over the government and push for policies often at odds with most people's interest," and cultural populism, which has had many variants, but which Chait defines here as a philosophy that chooses to "divide society along social lines, with the elites being intellectuals and other snobs who fancy themselves better than average Americans." Defined as liberal and conservative visions, the two appear in opposition. But traditionally, they've often been unified (think Ross Perot, or Pat Buchanan, or, more dangerously, George Wallace), and Clinton's past few weeks on the trails have seen her playing up a moderate form of economic populism and a weak form of cultural populism simultaneously. Chait is right to be annoyed with the anti-intellectualism that infected her gas tax holiday rhetoric and right to recoil from her comments touting support among "working, hard-working Americans, white Americans," but that's been as far as she's gone into cultural populism, and I'm willing to chalk the latter up as a Kinsleyan gaffe (after all, the press corps believes that too: Chait's colleague John Judis has often fretted over Obama's apparent weakness among the white working class). As it is, Clinton's been a much more consistent economic populist throughout the campaign -- a fact reflected by her domestic policy proposals -- and I don't think it necessary nor useful to take that from her. Frankly, Obama would probably have had less trouble winning the nomination had his instincts pushed him in a similar direction from the start. But Clinton's populism was a vote-getting device, and aside from that one comment about her support among white Americans, never dipped particularly deeply into the more vicious strains of cultural populism.
