And so, when Tim Russert said that economists believe the gas tax holiday won’t lower prices at the pump, Clinton campaign chairman Terry MacAuliffe replied, “Maybe for Barack Obama and for many of your economists, Tim, who you may talk to, you know what, maybe an extra hundred bucks for them isn’t a big deal. But I can tell you this, it is a big deal for most Americans.”
Social science analysis is the mortal enemy of conservative populism. The liberal populist sees politics as a series of quantifiable trade-offs between competing interests. The conservative populist offers an appeal that can’t be quantified: Who shares your values? Who is more manly? (James Carville: “If she gave him one of her cojones, they'd both have two.”)
If a liberal populist cites experts or numbers to back his position, that only proves to the conservative populist that he is out of touch. It’s the intellectual equivalent of buying arugula from Whole Foods. A Clinton endorser addressed a rally last month, “You didn’t go to Harvard! You weren’t born with a silver spoon in your mouth!” (Never mind that Clinton graduated from Yale Law School and had a far more stable, middle class upbringing than Obama.) In the liberal populists’ world, the locus of evil is K Street. In the conservative populists’ world, the locus of evil is Cambridge, Massachusetts.