Toby Harnden is a smart politcal correspondent for the Telegraph, but like a lot of observers this week he has a mistaken interpretation of Obama’s response to the death penalty ruling that came down on Thursday:

Obama’s a Mid-western senator rather than a Southern governor so he won’t have the opportunity Clinton had to fly back home to order the execution of a retarded man. But he did have the next best thing this week – the Supreme Court’s 5 to 4 decision that quashed the execution of a Louisiana man who raped his eight-year-old daughter.

Without a blink, Obama aligned himself with the Court’s four conservative justices – John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito – who had voted to uphold the death penalty for child rape. The father of girls aged nine and seven, he seized the opportunity to display populist revulsion and take a hard line against a despicable crime. Not for him the cool rationalism of Dukakis.

However, anyone who listened to Obama’s actual statement on the ruling would have been hard-pressed to find any “populist revulsion” in the man’s voice.  When reading it, there is no trace of “revulsion”:

I have said repeatedly that I think that the death penalty should be applied in very narrow circumstances for the most egregious of crimes. I think that the rape of a small child, six or eight years old is a heinous crime, and if a state makes a decision that under narrow, limited, well-defined circumstances, the death penalty is at least potentially applicable. That does not violate our Constitution.  Had the Supreme Court said, ‘We want to constrain the abilities of states to do this to make sure that it’s done in a careful and appropriate way,’ that would have been one thing. But it basically had a blanket prohibition and I disagree with that decision.

Whoa!  Calm down, Senator!  Obviously, Obama responded calmly and advanced a legal argument that the statute in question does not violate the Eighth Amendment.  As a matter of constitutional law, this seems right.  If his statement now counts as an expression of ”populist revulsion,” we are definitely lowering the bar for what constitutes populism.

The nature of Obama’s response is not surprising.  Whatever the merits of a given position, Obama never expresses “populist revulsion” even when he is talking about a popular policy (e.g., ending the war) or even when he is demagoguing against NAFTA.  In his more recent flip on NAFTA, he referred to ”overheated” rhetoric he used in the past, but the fact is that Obama never really uses “overheated” rhetoric; it is always pretty mild and tepid.  As many people have observed, Obama remains reserved and calm, and he tries to avoid flashes of anger, which are pretty much a requirement if you want to engage in some “populist revulsion” against elites, judicial or otherwise.  This reserved, calm persona is one of the things about his style that attracted conservative admirers and alienated some of the more, er, opinionated progressives.  If he risks being likened to Dukakis, I think his campaign considers that a risk worth taking if the alternative is being caricatured as a politician filled with anger or ridiculed like Dean after “the scream.”  

It may be that conservative talk radio hosts are blundering when they mocked his response earlier this week, but Obama’s response to the death penalty ruling only confirmed in their minds the similarities with someone like Dukakis.  Indeed, one of the things that most of Obama’s admirers like to stress is precisely his “cool rationalism,” which is not necessarily something that disqualifies Obama in the minds of most intelligent observers, but this was a potentially damaging perception that Bill Clinton managed to avoid.  That was a large part of the political advantage for Clinton’s sympathy shtick: it created, or tried to create, an emotional connection with voters that eluded wonkish and legalistic pols.

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