WARNER'S ANTI-POPULISM. If you want to know why I think the hype about Mark Warner is oddly misguided, look no further than his recent comments lambasting the Kerry campaign for attacking Bush's top-bracket tax cuts. He takes up that favorite of chin-stroking op-ed columnists everywhere, arguing that "Even though the Bush tax cuts only applied to the top 2 percent of Americans, what I think the Kerry campaign missed was that the other 98 percent of Americans still aspired to get to the point in their life." Color me unconvinced. Not only is Warner philosophically wrong here -- I don't know what sort of Democrat believes it's supportable public policy to raid the federal treasury to enrich the wealthy -- he's not even backed up by the polling data. Support for Bush's tax cuts is, and always has been, low. They've never been as popular as one might expect. Moreover, they've become less popular as time passed. In 2000, exit polls shows that voters naming "taxes" as their top issue went for Bush 80 percent to 17 percent -- it was by far his biggest advantage on any issue. In 2004, a number of those hardcore partisans were surely naming terrorism, but nevertheless, those obsessing over "taxes" were now voting a rather different ballot, favoring Bush by a mere 57 percent to 43 percent, a 49 percent swing in Kerry's favor. So where exactly is the evidence of all this aspirational abhorrence of populism? Polls show, and have shown, massive preferences among voters for the vast majority of Democratic economic positions. Few dispute that Bush won the election on national security and social conservatism, and most of those who do dispute it simply don't think Bush won the election. So while Warner's genial rejection of class warfare may play well on The Washington Post op-ed page, there's no reason to believe it's a good strategy, and lord knows it's terrible policy, particularly in an era when the federal treasury is starved for revenue and Democrats actually want to enact some social programs.
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Ezra Klein
