By Harold Meyerson
Thursday, April 19, 2007

With the presidential contest well underway, the 2008 political profiles of our two parties, which alter a bit during each four-year cycle, are already taking shape. The Democrats have turned to a new version of their favorite sport, intraparty class warfare. The Republicans, meanwhile, are drifting farther and farther away from their countrymen -- and not just over the war in Iraq.

As Perry Bacon Jr. reported in last Friday's Post, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney-- the most successful fundraiser among the Republican candidates -- is playing down his signal achievement as governor when he appears before GOP audiences. One year ago last week, Romney signed into law a statute that created near-universal health coverage in the state. Romney worked with Democrats in the legislature to create the program, which, since he left office, has gone through significant changes to broaden its scope and make it more affordable.

So here's the problem: The guy can work across party lines to establish a program that provides genuine security for an anxious public. By Republican standards, that's appalling.

Turns out that the partisan Republican audiences that Romney has been addressing don't like universal health insurance. They don't like the fee the Massachusetts law imposes on businesses that won't cover their employees (a provision the Democratic legislature created only by overriding Romney's veto). So Romney omits mention of this, his one and only star turn, in most of his major speeches, including his declaration of his candidacy.

You gotta give those Republicans credit: Forced to choose between ideological purity and workable solutions to real-world problems, they know which side they're on.

For the Democrats, the contest is settling into a pattern set four decades ago: primary-season class conflict, in which one candidate appeals to a younger and more upscale electorate by talking about political reform and other chiefly noneconomic concerns, while another emphasizes pocketbook issues to the party's working-class voters. In primaries past, the upscale-reformer role has been embraced by Eugene McCarthy, Morris Udall, Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley and Howard Dean, while the part of the more populist bread-and-butter battler has been played by Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, Richard Gephardt and John Edwards, among others. This year's upscale reformer, as Ronald Brownstein keenly noted in his Los Angeles Times column last month, is Barack Obama.

So far, Obama is observing all the upscale conventions. Unlike Edwards, Obama is not campaigning against financiers who profit from outsourcing American jobs or drug companies that drive the price of medications to unregulated heights. Rather, he campaigns against the compromises, the shallowness, the corruptions inherent in our political and legislative processes. To create universal health coverage, Edwards prescribes taxing the rich, while Obama prescribes an open discussion, free from the taint of campaign contributions, that ultimately may lead us to embrace Edwards's prescription -- or not.

A Los Angeles Times-Bloomberg survey from last week showed Obama outpolling not just Edwards but also Hillary Clinton in higher-income groups. Clinton, however, is beating Obama two-to-one among working-class voters. Though she's nobody's populist, Clinton is certainly waging a less ethereal campaign than Obama. And while Clinton has encountered hostile responses from activists for her position on the war, Obama, while getting rapturous receptions from younger audiences, has been bombing before such working-class confabs as the service workers' health-care forum in Nevada and the International Association of Firefighters conference in Washington. He's been short not just on specifics but also on pugnacity.

Declaring his candidacy in Springfield, Ill., Obama summoned memories of Lincoln as well as of the last Illinois governor to run for president, Adlai Stevenson, the first modern, upscale Democratic reformer, who lost twice to Dwight Eisenhower. In what I believe to be the first article to discuss the coming class typologies of Democratic candidates -- "Stevenson and the Intellectuals," a prophetic 1954 essay -- literary and political critic Irving Howe noted that Stevenson wasn't really as liberal as Harry Truman had been on economic questions but that he was "admired and identified with" by the new middle-class Democratic reformers "because he didn't really seem to like politics." He was the candidate, wrote Howe, "who would rise above mere group interests."

Sounds a lot like Obama to me. Maybe the first electable African American candidate for president has to be the least pugnacious and particularistic of candidates, lest he trigger unspoken racist anxieties among some white voters. More likely, I suspect, demonstrating some pugnacity may be the key to gaining enough support among white working-class voters to win the White House.

Of course, if the Republicans continue their journey to the edge of the galaxy, they may float beyond the realm of electability no matter what the Democrats do. But a little Democratic belligerence in the causes of class and nation and planet wouldn't hurt.

meyersonh@washpost.com