"Tom Nelson, a longtime union advocate, is running for the Democratic nomination for Wisconsin’s Senate seat as a genuine populist, not the phony kind with a Harvard degree who affects an accent."

Writes Jennifer Rubin in "Wisconsin’s Tom Nelson reminds Democrats how populists should sound" (WaPo). 

Who's she talking about — "the phony kind with a Harvard degree who affects an accent"? Russ Feingold??! (He went to Harvard, but he's really from Wisconsin, not faking an accent.)

I've been living in Wisconsin since 1984, and I don't know which politicians have affected the accent. But maybe Rubin isn't talking about Wisconsin. She's acting like she's talking about Wisconsin though, so — speaking of phony — I'm expecting her to talk about Wisconsin.

Who, exactly, is being impugned? Someone is terribly fake, apparently, but who? We're not told who this fake-accent Harvard person might be, but we are told the name of someone Nelson views as a role model: William Proxmire, who "popularized the Golden Fleece award to highlight wasteful government spending."

From the comments over there:

I would emphasize that there is populism that examines root causes of the things that affect the lives of average people, making real efforts to understand and improve their lives, and there is populism that capitalizes on people’s ignorance and insecurities, setting up scapegoats and treating government as the enemy, rather than a tool that can benefit people when utilized correctly.

William Proxmire was a good example of the latter. A man who was addicted to lampooning government and scientists, he would attack federal support for serious scientific research programs, mischaracterizing their goals and the benefits they could produce. He frequently used scientists as foils for his claims that government wasted tax dollars, undermining support for scientific research. This kind of populism, which is practiced most frequently now by republicans, substituted propaganda for real analysis and disinformation for facts.

As we examine those who claim the populist mantle, it is important to ask whether their policies and pronouncements are fact-based, or just demagoguery. We must do this for all politicians, of course, but populism can lend itself to counterfactualism when improperly applied.

Lastly, I suspect some will understand that populism doesn’t require a blue collar pedigree. Teddy Roosevelt is but one of many examples.