Entry 9:

Dear David,

It looks like we agree on Al Gore's weird personality. You're right: The man really can't switch it off. But it seems to me this is less a function of a life spent in politics and more a malady of the successful generally. The compulsive optimism, the brown-nosing, the résumé-padding: Gore has utterly internalized the values of the meritocracy. Maybe a discussion of Al Gore should be Appendix A in the new, revised edition of Bobos in Paradise.

Bush fils, on the other hand, has different problems. He's glib, he's reassuring, he's got a certain charm. He represents a social type quite different from your basic Bobo: the WASP who has dealt with the decline of his species by learning to mimic his employees. What Bush has internalized is a lifetime of Marlboro ads and TV westerns. Of course, the man can't find his ass with both hands.

Fortunately for W., fake populism is precisely what the Republican Party required at this historical moment. You mentioned Gore's failure to win over the Democratic Party's working-class base, and I wonder if this failure wasn't related directly to the way in which each man performed the populist role. Gore, as I noted a few days ago, did a singularly poor job feigning concern for "working families." He just couldn't shake the meritocrat within. But Bush was able to pull off his swaggering variant of the populist charade with an impressive amount of style. (I saw a photo of him in the New York Times the other day where he was posed before a mantelpiece decorated gaily with an assortment of red bandannas. Now there's a weird WASP taste mutation that I think you could really sink your teeth into, David.)

When I say Bush is a populist I do not mean he subscribes to the racist right-wing populism of yore. I think he's more of a market populist, largely abandoning the culture war stuff and mixing militantly pro-business politics unproblematically with regular-guy appeal. For George W. Bush, the offspring of the oil industry, this came quite naturally.

Let me change gears here and address your curious remark about "Schadenfreude." Obviously no one looks forward to a recession, especially someone with my political sentiments: Workers are able to bargain most effectively when the labor market is tight (as they're about to find out at Amazon.com). And wage workers will also bear the brunt of any economic collapse, especially now that the far-sighted liberals of the Clinton administration have ended welfare. But at the same time, markets left to their own devices go through business cycles. It's systemic. There's no avoiding it, despite the shimmering fantasies of the New Economy believers. And trying to pin the savage ups and downs of the market on anyone other than those who have worked for deregulation, privatization, and de-unionization over the last 20 years--as the Wall Street Journal does so frequently--is close to political derangement.

One other thing: The health of the stock market is most definitely not the health of the nation. A terrific amount of resources have gone into persuading us otherwise over the last 10 years, of course, but it is simply not the case. Stocks do well when wages do not. Stocks do well when unions are beaten, when workers live under austerity regimes, when all the power is with management. True, 48 percent of families own some shares. But, as Doug Henwood of the great newsletter Left Business Observer points out, the top 1 percent of stockholders actually control 48 percent of total stock while the top 10 percent control 86 percent. The bottom 80 percent of stockholders control only 4 percent. Yes, some people have 401(k)s, but why should their earnings from those tiny holdings always be privileged over their earnings from wages?

Would I feel a little cheery if the Nasdaq tanked? I admit it might be nice to see James Cramer and the CNBC gang eat a little crow. But the real point is this. Today you suspect critics of the market of Schadenfreude; tomorrow (when Bush II has "invested" Social Security in the markets) others will accuse us of taking bread from the mouths of dotards, widows, and orphans. That's the problem with these putatively results-oriented "market solutions." They are in fact a gun pointed at the head of any politician or interest group that doesn't march in lockstep with Wall Street.