The whole socialism button is a bit of a paper tiger.

"All Democratic presidential campaigns, whether desperate or confident, in good times or bad, turn populist at the end. Barack Obama's is a little different. "Quiet populism," a phrase I first saw used by Ben Smith of Politico, seems at first to be the best concise description of the Democratic nominee's recent language on the economy, with its strong commitment to rebuilding opportunity but a cool, calm, optimistic tone of national purpose.

And yet, how "quiet" can "populism" ever be? Isn't populism as we know it characterized by the forceful oppositions of, say, Al Gore's "people vs. the powerful" in the closing weeks of the 2000 campaign, or by John Edwards' "Two Americas"? Alternatively, there's a right-wing populism that sets up a dichotomy between ordinary Americans and educated "elites," currently embodied by Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. In his great 1995 book, The Populist Persuasion, Michael Kazin offers "the most basic and telling definition of populism: a language whose speakers conceive of ordinary people as a noble assemblage not bounded narrowly by class, view their elite opponents as self-serving and undemocratic, and seek to mobilize the former against the latter."

This is a better description of the McCain-Palin campaign, which recently supplemented its right-populist attack on cosmopolitan elites, as featured at the GOP convention, with a sudden promise to "put an end to reckless greed" and an argument that, "We have seen self-interest, greed, irresponsibility, and corruption undermine the hard work of the American people." ..."

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What Obama is is a compassionate populist, not a socialist.

The difference will not be detected by those wearing blinders, but it is an important, fundamental distinction--the difference between banditry and compassion.

A