Edwards asks, “How long are we going to let drug companies and insurance companies run America?” He insists, “I don’t think you can take money from these people, sit at the table and deal with them.” No subtlety here about the accusation that Clinton and Obama are prisoners of special interest groups.

Axis of Evil

Like Edwards in the Democratic field, the relatively unknown Mike Huckabee, a former pastor from Arkansas in the south, has muddied the Republican waters by ranting against the ‘Washington-Wall Street axis’.

Pitting himself against the east coast establishment (his main Republican rival in Iowa is Mitt Romney, the sophisticated governor of Massachusetts) Huckabee promises to change the Republican Party by forcing it to represent the interests of the ordinary people rather than the wealthy.

“If you ask a hedge fund manager what’s he worried about, he’s going to give you a very different answer than a guy who just lost his job in a factory”, Huckabee says.

Having already pandered to the Christian Right by opposing abortion and gay rights, Huckabee bets that the ‘rich versus poor’ rhetoric might give him the badly needed boost.

The writer is professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore iscrmohan@ntu.edu.sg