Looks like the presidential candidates, and certain columnists, have finally figured out that voters are living in the real world. Welcome, people. We are tired of Washington caving constantly to the corporations. Real life is not about how much profit Wal-Mart makes, it's about how the average American sees his paycheck shrinking. It's about affordable health care, the cost of gasoline, sending our children to college. Some candidates seem to understand this; others are only giving the people lip service. It's up to us to weed them out and elect those who really care about us.

Just hours after Huckabee spoke Saturday, Democrat John Edwards gave a raucous crowd in Des Moines a rousing anti-corporate oration a few decibel levels above his already fire-breathing stump speech. He attacked "corporate greed," "the glorification of corporate profit," "the banks and the insurance companies," Exxon Mobil and Halliburton, the people who "have a stranglehold on the American economy."

"The richest Americans are getting richer," Edwards said. "How much money do these people need?" Roaring his refrain of "enough is enough," Edwards declared: "America doesn't belong to them. It belongs to us."

Us-vs.-them economic rhetoric is often said to be out of date, impractical, even dangerous. But in the closing days of a very tight race, Edwards has his opponents, particularly Barack Obama, scrambling to make sure a trial lawyer from North Carolina does not corner the market on populism.

Obama is vying with Edwards for the non-Clinton vote, and the Illinois senator was on the air yesterday with an Edwards-like television ad assailing the flow of American jobs abroad. Obama spoke last week of "Maytag workers who labored all their lives only to see their jobs shipped overseas; who now compete with their teenagers for $7-an-hour jobs at Wal-Mart." He had heard from seniors "who were betrayed by CEOs who dumped their pensions while pocketing bonuses, and from those who still can't afford their prescriptions because Congress refused to negotiate with the drug companies for the cheapest available price."

Even Hillary Clinton, whose discourse is typically longer on policy details than egalitarian wrath, told an appreciative crowd in Story City last week that the "interests of working middle-class families" had been "subordinated to the interests of the wealthy and well-connected" and that the Bush administration acted on the mortgage crisis "only after Wall Street began to feel the credit crunch." She promised to "end the student loan industry's scams, which have ripped off families" and condemned "no-bid contracts," "cronyism" and "corruption."