At the moment, many analysts agree, it is an especially ripe time to launch an economic populist campaign. Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center said his surveys showed the highest level of concern over income inequality since the late 1980s, when he started examining the issue. Stagnant wages for much of middle America, big gains for the very rich and growing strains from rising gas prices and the like all set the stage for the debate, Mr. Kohut says. “This is an issue that’s going to get a hearing in this campaign,” he says. “It will resonate.”

But those who claim to stand with the people inevitably face a counterattack, which some Democrats are also rediscovering.

Even as former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina began his tour this week to highlight American poverty, the Republican National Committee was weighing in with a series of questions and attacks. It essentially boiled down to this: Can a multi-millionaire former trial lawyer with a high-flying lifestyle really understand or care about poverty or middle class America? Can he both profit under the current system through hedge funds and the like and vow to change it?

Some liberal bloggers fumed that this critique presumed that it would somehow be better — more authentic — for a rich man to stand up for his own class interests than to speak up for working America. They were especially irritated at the news media’s coverage of the issue.

Alluding to Mr. Edward’s tour of poor communities, and his emphasis on the issue overall, Paul Waldman wrote on The American Prospect's TAPPED that this could tell voters “something about who Edwards is: that he cares about people who are suffering, that he hasn’t forgotten the modest circumstances from which he came and that he has the courage to tackle big, seemingly intractable problems.”