Barack Obama might be on to something. He has brought class warfare to American politics. Well, revived it anyway, after Al Gore rode it to a loss in the 2000 presidential election. In fact, America has seen such outbreaks from time to time, most notably when William Jennings Bryan represented the debtor class by calling for a debased currency in his “You shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold” presidential campaigns of 1896, 1900, and 1908. He lost all three.

That was then, and this is now. For one thing, Obama’s attack on “fat cat bankers” who, he says, brought on our current troubles, but escaped unscathed after taxpayer bailouts, is falling on the sympathetic ears of the unemployed and underemployed, families who have been converted to renters from homeowners after being dispossessed by those bankers, and parents worried that even their college-graduated children will slide down the living standard scale. As Manhattan Institute economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth points out at RealClearMarkets.com, “The unemployment rate in 2010 for newly graduated men and women with bachelor degrees was 9.2 percent, far higher than the 5.1 percent rate such adults experienced in 2005.” Worse still, she cites new studies that show that “graduating in a recession leads to earnings losses that last for 10 years after graduation.”