Thomas Frank: Where Have You Gone, Dickey Flatt?

July 16, 2008

When former Sen. Phil Gramm, who now serves as an economic adviser to John McCain, declared last week that Americans had become a "nation of whiners"—that we were scared of a recession that was only "mental"—what struck me was not so much the remark's meanness but its symbolic significance. This, historians will someday say, was the snarling end of an era in which our leaders believed that markets represented the very will of the people; that to serve one was to serve the other.

Although it seems hard to believe now, it once pleased the press to call Mr. Gramm a "populist." Long before he scolded the common man as a whiner, Mr. Gramm was widely thought to have the common touch himself. He was the sort of politician who could "connect with working people," he said in 1995, and he used to wax righteous about "the people who do the work and pay the taxes and pull the wagon." Mr. Gramm even came up with his own salt-of-the-earth everyman to champion: one Dickey Flatt, a printer in Texas, whose tax burden had to be weighed against the cost of any federal program before it won Sen. Gramm's judicious nod.