It ended up endorsing the House bill, even though by one estimate it will cost doctors almost $19,000 annually by its third year. Even the vilified insurers have been running gauzy TV ads in favor of reform (although they oppose the public option).

Aggrieved voters don’t co-opt or cow so easily. When one angry man stood toe-to-toe with Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and condemned his “damn cronies,” he was the outraged voice of American populism.

His beef probably wasn’t with Specter or his associates exactly, but with the entire panoply of interests battening on the new era of corporatism and hulking government, from Goldman Sachs to the United Auto Workers to the lobbyists gaming the...

It ended up endorsing the House bill, even though by one estimate it will cost doctors almost $19,000 annually by its third year. Even the vilified insurers have been running gauzy TV ads in favor of reform (although they oppose the public option).

Aggrieved voters don’t co-opt or cow so easily. When one angry man stood toe-to-toe with Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and condemned his “damn cronies,” he was the outraged voice of American populism.

His beef probably wasn’t with Specter or his associates exactly, but with the entire panoply of interests battening on the new era of corporatism and hulking government, from Goldman Sachs to the United Auto Workers to the lobbyists gaming the stimulus and cap-and-trade bills. Like it or not (and it always has its unfortunate excesses), this kind of populism is part of the idiom of American politics.

Liberal intellectuals hail populism when the likes of Andrew Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Obama direct it against “the malefactors of great wealth.”

They are appalled when it is turned against the grand schemes of Washington itself. But they should listen.

“It’s been a mistake for anyone to say that this has been a manufactured effort,” Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri said after her own rollicking town hall. “This is real. It’s grass-roots.”

Despite all the media tsk-tsking about the tenor of the meetings, a USA Today poll found that independents, by a 2-to-1 margin, say the protests have made them more sympathetic to the protesters, rather than less.

Still controlling the inside game, Democrats will be tempted to steamroll their opponents anyway. In which case, the populist revolt will have just begun.

by Rich Lowry at NYP