January 2010 was the month President Barack Obama tried to get in touch with his inner populist. Shaken by a Republican victory in Massachusetts and the likely defeat of his health-care bill, he adopted the lingo of an insurrectionary orator, calling out the big banks in his State of the Union address.  "If these firms can afford to hand out big bonuses again," he said, "they can afford a modest fee to pay back the taxpayers who rescued them in their time of need." For much of the media, that was enough to conjure an image of Mr. Obama in bib overalls at the head of a pitchfork army.  William Jennings Bryan, center, and clockwise from upper right, Huey Long, a Tea Party protester in 2009, Walter Winchell, 'Alfalfa Bill' Murray and Charles Coughlin.  That's one possible reaction to the president's rhetoric. Here's another: How can anyone possibly take this pose seriously? If all you knew about Barack Obama was that he once held a job called "community organizer," you might be forgiven for finding something populist in his persona. The rest of you have no excuses. Even when attacking the malefactors of great wealth, Mr. Obama evinces all the insurgent anger of Charlie Rose obsequiously interviewing a starlet.  To cast this man as a populist, you needn't merely imagine an alternate America where a William Jennings Bryan, the explosive orator who ran unsuccessfully three times for the White House in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, has actually captured the presidency. You need to imagine a Bryan who went to Harvard and taught at an elite law school, who received more money than his opponent from Wall Street and the corporate media, who personally intervened during the presidential campaign to help a bank bailout become law, who surrounded himself with advisers drawn from Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, and whose solution to an economic crisis has been to propose a program of corporate subsidies. A populist? Even at his most liberal, pushing a plan to move the country toward universal health coverage, Mr. Obama's idea of advancing reform is to cut deals with all the industries involved so they'll back his legislation.  There are politicians who have a gift for rabble-rousing rhetoric, and there are politicians who have a gift for sounding conciliatory even when they're showing you the back of their hand. There's no question which category includes Mr. Obama: The same State of the Union speech that included his little dig at the banks was overflowing with appeals to bipartisanship. He even threw in a defensive apologia for the Wall Street bailout.  Mr. Obama's populist act may be unbelievable, but it isn't unprecedented. Leaders ranging from Harry Truman to George W. Bush have cast themselves as outsiders challenging the elites even as they occupy the Oval Office, a base of operations that's pretty much impossible to acquire unless you have a lot of elite friends. Such presidential pretensions are one of the stranger side effects of the American populist tradition.  There are many ways to sort the figures who fall into that tradition. The most useful approach builds on a distinction drawn by the historian Lawrence Goodwyn. In "Democratic Promise," his study of the 19th-century Populist Party, Mr. Goodwyn distinguishes the "authentic" and "shadow" faces of populism. The key difference here isn't ideology. It's the depth of a movement's roots.  For Mr. Goodwyn, the "authentic" populists were the farmers who formed cooperatives and then organized politically to create an environment in which those co-ops could thrive. The "shadow" populists were fledgling politicians who attached themselves to the Democratic Party and to Bryan's gimmicky crusade to coin silver money. The first group, Mr. Goodwyn argues, was constructing a "democratic culture." The second had "no institutional base, no collective identity, and no movement culture," just conventional "hierarchical politics." One emerged from popular discontent; the other attempted to exploit it.  Mr. Goodwyn is often accused of romanticizing the populists, and his account, soaked in the ambience of the New Left, is by no means the last word on the subject. The writer's rival interpreters range from Michael Kazin, who sees populism as a mutable rhetorical style that is "more an impulse than an ideology," to Charles Postel, who argues that the original populist movement was a much more forward-looking, modern milieu than the more familiar narratives acknowledge.  But whether or not you accept all of Mr. Goodwyn's gloss on the Populist Party, he has hit on a handy tool for understanding the eruptions that have broken out since that party departed the scene. Working from his two categories, we can see the outlines of two populist traditions in the U.S. The first is the populism of grass-roots groups—some on the left, some on the right, some hard to classify—that are dominated by unpaid, part-time activists rather than professional political operatives. The second is the populism of the people's tribune, a fiery figure who acts, or claims to act, as a champion of the masses.  The elected tribune typically mixes elements of left and right, centralization and decentralization, self-aggrandizement and constituent service. Besides Bryan, this type is represented by the likes of Louisiana's Huey Long and Oklahoma's "Alfalfa Bill" Murray, Depression-era governors (and, in Long's case, a senator) whose careers and views defy easy summary. Long's efforts to redistribute his state's wealth by any means necessary put him on the far left end of the political spectrum, but his critiques of the Federal Reserve, the National Recovery Administration, and military intervention abroad also overlapped considerably with the views of the populist right. Murray was both a champion of the Chickasaw and a fierce foe of blacks; he intervened freely in Oklahoma's economy, enforcing oil-production quotas and other orders via martial law, but he opposed Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.  In some ways such governors resembled the aging progressives in the House and Senate who turned against the New Deal because it displayed the same concentration of power that they opposed in corporate America. But Long and Murray had no trouble with power when it was concentrated in the governor's mansion.  Confronted with a specimen like Murray, who infamously campaigned against "the three Cs—corporations, carpetbaggers and coons," it's tempting to dismiss the tribunes as mere demagogues. But like entrepreneurs invading a complacent industry, the people's tribune succeeds by stressing topics his more respectable rivals prefer to ignore. When ordinary voters feel neglected by ordinary politics, the tribune will channel their resentments. And if that sometimes means that ugly sentiments that once were confined to whispers will spill out into public debate, it also means that legitimate anger about a host of arrogant policies, from urban renewal to police harassment to corporate bailouts, can be forced into the open as well.  The tribune is traditionally a politician, but you needn't be an elected official to play the role. In 21st-century America, the natural place for the people's tribune is in front of a camera or a radio microphone. From consumer reporters to talk-show hosts, from Michael Moore and his calculatedly schlubby style to Glenn Beck and his anticonspiracy crusades, pop culture is filled with self-proclaimed paladins of the people who venture into the public arena to wage symbolic battles with the targets of popular resentment.  Some of those media tribunes are more sincere than others. Taken as a group, their careers are a mix of self-serving self-puffery, efforts to co-opt grass-roots enthusiasm for a commercial or political agenda, and, yes, genuine efforts to expose wrongdoing and to better people's lives. These are the ambulance-chasing attorneys of American politics: often obnoxious, not always honest and sometimes a necessary agent of justice.  You could argue that these rootless radio and TV stars are the apotheosis of Mr. Goodwyn's shadow populism. Drawing power from the Nielsen meter instead of the ballot box, they may look like men and women with "no institutional base, no collective identity, and no movement culture." But in another way, they indicate that there can be more to shadow populism than Mr. Goodwyn's dismissive description suggests. Call-in hosts in particular represent a species that has only recently emerged: the political leader whose power rests not in his constituents but in his fans.  I don't mean the distant fandom that helped fuel, say, the rise of Ronald Reagan. Nor is this the sort of following that allowed earlier generations of broadcasters and newsmen, from Charles Coughlin to Walter Winchell, to wield influence without holding office. It's something much more participatory. Part of the AM-radio host's appeal is that he interacts directly with his audience every day: He doesn't just speak but listens, and they don't just listen but argue back. It isn't an equal arrangement. But the innate intimacy of radio, especially call-in radio, gives the tribune a connection with his followers that's rather different from the relations enjoyed by ordinary politicians and pundits. That really is an institutional base, it can create a collective identity, and if it isn't a movement culture then at least it's a fan culture.  The result is an era in which the lines have blurred between popular culture and populist politics. We not only have Al Franken moving from a comedy career and a call-in show into the U.S. Senate, we have Sarah Palin leaving a governor's mansion because she felt she could be more influential as a media icon than as an elected official.  Government is rarely as unpredictable as it is when members of the establishment attempt to corral these insurgent energies for their own agenda. See, for example, the unpredictable dance going on between the Tea Party movement and the Republican regulars. Look under that big Tea Party umbrella and you'll find both a grass-roots revolt against the people who run the Republican Party and a sustained effort to turn the Tea Parties into a get-out-the-vote drive for the GOP.  President Obama is an indirect beneficiary of the work done by the netroots, the decentralized online army of activists that is the closest there is to a left-wing equivalent of the Tea Parties. But in his years as a national figure, he has no history of trying to hop on the populist tiger himself. If he intends for this dalliance to be more than a short-lived posture, he'll be in for quite a ride.
Obama dons a venerable mantle, but William Jennings Bryan's real descendants may be media stars. Jesse Walker looks at who does and doesn't deserve the title of populist.