The aisles were packed at Politics and Prose, a bookstore in one of America's most affluent neighborhoods, when a billionaire's father arrived to promote his book calling for higher taxes on the rich. The customers there to buy copies of Wealth and our commonwealth loudly applauded William H. Gates as he denounced greedy plutocrats and declared the estate tax to be "the finest tax conceived by man."
A quick survey of these book buyers Washington found precisely zero percent in favor of the White House's proposed tax cuts. Echoing Democrats in Congress, they called it "unfair," "a giveaway to the rich," "a disaster."
The closest encouraging word for the Bush plan came a few doors up Connecticut Avenue at Besta Pizza, a tiny carryout shop owned by an Egyptian immigrant, Tarek Zahow, who commutes to his 70-hour-a-week job from a much less upscale neighborhood 20km out of town.
"Of course I'm for tax cuts," Zahow said. He said he supported the White House's proposal, even though he realized the affluent would receive most of the money, and he favored eliminating the estate tax even if it applied only to millionaires.
"I'm nowhere near a million in assets, but I might be someday," he said. "I don't think it's fair to have a tax for just a few people. Charge everyone the same."
However irrational he may seem to Democrats, Zahow was just the sort of voter President Bush was addressing when he accused the critics of his tax plan of engaging in "class warfare."
Populist appeals can work during tough economic times, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt demonstrated, but Republicans are betting that Zahow is more representative of today's voters than the elder Gates' fans are.
"Any time you have a tax cut, the majority of people will say it favors the rich, but so what?" said Matthew Dowd, a pollster who advises the White House and the Republican National Committee. "This issue just doesn't resonate with most Americans the way it does with the Democratic Party's activists and core constituencies."
Republicans point to various surveys showing acceptance of tax breaks for the affluent. In a New York Times/CBS poll two years ago, 71 percent of the respondents opposed an estate tax even after being told it would apply only to estates above US$1 million.
Even when the threshold was raised to US$3.5 million, in a subsequent poll last year, the tax was still opposed by 41 percent of Americans (with 54 percent in favor).
Stanley Greenberg, a pollster for the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and Al Gore, said populist themes worked for Clinton in 1992 and helped Gore go from an 11-point deficit to a 5-point lead (and eventually a slim popular-vote majority) in the 2000 campaign.
"The Bush tax plan is a particularly narrow proposal that's easily caricatured," Greenberg said. "The Democrats ought to engage it in class terms, but that does not mean they are going to offer an angry populism."
Guy Molyneux, a Democratic pollster who has been conducting a national poll for the AFL-CIO the past several days, said he had found only lukewarm support for Bush's tax cuts.
"This tax proposal reinforces the concern that he's the rich man's president," Molyneux said.
"If the country is persuaded that the dividend tax cut will dramatically improve the stock market, that would be an important source of support for the plan, but I don't think that's going to happen."
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