Buyer's remorse coming for the Democrats?

Holman Jenkins makes the case for why the Democrats, sighing relief over dodging the Dean bullet, have a case of buyer's remorse coming their way by backing Kerry, who likes to villify "Big Pharma." Excerpts:

No demagogue, left or right, fails to present himself as champion of the great, victimized majority against some tiny and exploitive elite. This argument is convenient for two reasons. Difficult issues like health-care financing, involving real tensions between hard-to-reconcile goals, can be reduced to utmost simplicity: On one side are the legitimate claims of voters who want cheaper drugs or whatever; on the other are the illegitimate claims of those who "stand in the way."

Populist claptrap serves another purpose, visible on the very persons of the candidates: They swell with confidence and invulnerability when posing as defenders of the "little guy" rather than as champions of the party's own array of special interests and voting blocs (which is what they are).

The force really at work is fear -- fear on the part of Democratic leaders that they have nothing to offer; fear that their party's captivity by groups tied to existing programs forecloses any chance of innovative thinking. Notice that the party did not even wait for eight years of unrivaled Clinton prosperity to expire before Al Gore, in a panic, reverted to what a Washington Post editorial called "primitive business bashing" as a substitute for saying what some Democratic lobby group somewhere wouldn't like. Notice what a miserable disappointment even Howard Dean has been in this regard.

Notice, too, the wonder of John Kerry, an asterisk six weeks ago, who reached his present eminence based on the repetition of meaningless phrases: "I know something about aircraft carriers for real." "Bring it on." "Don't let the door hit you on the way out."

There is, literally, nothing else to the Kerry campaign. He's the default option of Democratic voters after the amazing rise and fall of Howard Dean, with the mother of all buyer's remorse coming down the pike about a minute or two behind. That's too bad but as a party they asked for it -- and will keep doing so until they stop relying on the mindless naming of "villains" in place of dealing honestly with the voters whom they claim to represent.