In article from our last print issue, Harold Meyerson explores how populism and environmentalism are working together:
The dominant ideology among this year's Democratic candidates for seriously contested Senate and House seats might be called neo-Bryanism. Where once William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic nominee for president, thundered on behalf of beleaguered late-19th-century farmers against "the cross of gold" (Wall Street's tight-money policy), today's down-ticket Democrats are running against oil companies and Wall Street's commodity speculators. And as Bryan touted free silver as the fix for farmers' credit woes, today's Democrats are pushing alternative energy as a solution for spiraling gas prices and heating bills, as well as a jobs-generator--a 21st-century public-private Works Progress Administration--for a troubled economy.
And Paul Waldman writes that smears about Obama will only worsen if he wins the election:
But as we finally approach the end of this campaign, one has to wonder whether Obama knows quite what he's in for. Not what will happen over the next three weeks but what he'll face if he actually wins. Because for all his talk of bringing Americans together, a President Obama could face an opposition so consumed with disgust and anger and outright hate that it would make the 1990s look like a tea party.
That, of course, was what was supposed to happen if Hillary Clinton were the nominee. In fact, one of the arguments Obama supporters made early in the primary process was that if Clinton prevailed, the vast right-wing conspiracy would kick into high gear, besieging the woman they had hated so much for so long with an assault of unimagined viciousness. But now there is little doubt that that machinery of obsessive hostility was easily retrofitted for a new target.
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—The Editors