>But as you point out, a "centrist" politician using populism
>is really just trying to "throw the bums out" but offering
>no real change in the sysyems or structures of power, and no
>real policy changes. What's the point?
There's a big boneheaded tradition in American political discourse that's anti-political - that uses "political" as a synonym for partisan self-interest, the lust for personal power, at the expense of the general interest. So, you've got Ds and Rs duking it out in their inside-the-beltway fashion instead of attending to the business of the country, as if the nature of that business were simple and self-evident. Perot's rhetoric in '92 was all about this - it was just a matter of rolling up your sleeves and looking under the hood to see what's wrong. No sense of "politics" (in Margaret Atwood's pungent definition) as the matter of who does what to whom and gets away with it.
Doug