Not Jeffersonians at all.

There has been much ado about Joe Wilson's rebel cry against the President during a joint session of Congress. As a progressive or radical or something like that, I naturally take issue with Representative Wilson. Yet I have to agree with David Brooks (in his NYT column today) that 'it's not about race.'

At least not mostly. I think there might remain a hint of racism in the conservative southern Joe Wilson. I see it still around me here in this small southern town I live in. Jimmy Carter is correct about that. It's by no means completely gone.

Yet President Bush appointed Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice to be his two Secretaries of State. Either of them might have had a shot at winning the Republican nomination if they had run. That being the case, it seems hard to say that racism still dominates the Republican party.

Yet David Brooks' answer, that rural white 'populism' is rebelling against progressive 'elitism', doesn't seem right either. The only person I know who went to the 9/12 rally was hardly rural (though he was white). He was a retired urologist, who had graduated from Princeton and Wake Forest University. (Indeed, the only conservative Republican staffer I know, who works for Mitch McConnell, is a sophisticated, well-educated young lady from one of the wealthier families in town.)

No, this is not the Hamiltonians (progressives) versus the Jeffersonians (populists), as Brooks postulates. That dichotomy does not exist anymore.

The disciples of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Seann Hannity, and Fox News who attended 9/12 are a weird mixture of corporate interests, Wall Street bankers, Chamber of Commerce types, southern reactionaries, the military and their supporters, neo-conservatives, old thinking physicians, fearful elderly, libertarians, small-town 4th of July patriots, NRA members, Christian fundamentalists and so on.

Now the odd thing is they 'only' make up some 30% or less of our population. But their ferocity, stoked by nonstop watching of Fox News celebrities and listening to the ravings of Rush Limbaugh, makes up for their smaller numbers. Indeed, this make them a potent national force to be reckoned with, as Nancy Pelosi made clear yesterday, when she urged a lower of the national temperature and rhetoric, recalling the violence in San Francisco more than 30 years ago.

No, David, if Thomas Jefferson were alive today, I doubt he would have attended the 9/12 Beckian rally in Washington. That former Ambassador to France, a true francophile, would probably have stayed at Monticello, reading his books and tending his garden.