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I know everyone was entranced by Bill Clinton's speech last night, as well they should have been. The man has more charisma in his pinkie than the biggest rock star has in their entire body. And there's no question he laid out the most compelling case possible for re-electing President Obama. But the really important speech last night in terms of raw substance, by far, was Elizabeth Warren's 15 minutes.

Because Warren made clear, even more than Clinton, what really is at stake in this election. It's down to a simple choice for Americans: Do they want democracy, or do they want oligarchy, rule by the rich? It's really that simple, that stark, and that significant.

Here's Warren last night:

I’m here tonight to talk about hard-working people: people who get up early, stay up late, cook dinner and help out with homework; people who can be counted on to help their kids, their parents, their neighbors, and the lady down the street whose car broke down; people who work their hearts out but are up against a hard truth--the game is rigged against them.

... People feel like the system is rigged against them. And here’s the painful part: they’re right. The system is rigged. Look around. Oil companies guzzle down billions in subsidies. Billionaires pay lower tax rates than their secretaries. Wall Street CEOs--the same ones who wrecked our economy and destroyed millions of jobs--still strut around Congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them.

Anyone here have a problem with that? Well I do.

... The Republican vision is clear: “I’ve got mine, the rest of you are on your own.” Republicans say they don’t believe in government. Sure they do. They believe in government to help themselves and their powerful friends. After all, Mitt Romney’s the guy who said corporations are people.

No, Governor Romney, corporations are not people. People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they cry, they dance. They live, they love, and they die. And that matters. That matters because we don’t run this country for corporations, we run it for people. And that’s why we need Barack Obama.

As D-Day puts it:

That’s simply a far more honest portrayal of the America we actually live in than anyone usually articulates on stage at a national political convention. She told the story in broad strokes, the story people feel in their core, the story that anyone paying attention since the Great Recession knows. We’re not a fairy-tale land where everyone can grow up and be whatever they want. We’re not a land of social mobility and equality of opportunity. We’re in an economy that’s unraveled pretty badly, and over a 30-year period, that has cut off those avenues for mobility, and now has become a favor factory for the rich and powerful. People may not want to hear this; but they know it.

The great battles of this turbulent era will keep going on for years to come. The ideologues who want no check whatsoever on the power of big business have declared war on the middle class, and want no one to get in their way. Governors like Scott Walker and John Kasich will brook no compromise in trying to destroy unions. Right-wing politicians who have long wanted to do away with Social Security and Medicare and pretty much all safety nets for the poor are getting more and more brazen: Speaker Boehner made clear last week his plans to go after Social Security and Medicare sooner rather than later. And it is not just economics: the extremists are coming after not just a woman's right to choose, but even birth control itself with their attempts to shut down family planning funding.

The good news is that, as I wrote in The Washington Post this weekend, these attacks on the things we hold dear are putting the "movement" back in the labor movement (and the women's movement, and the progressive movement). We are going to march and demonstrate, we are going to recall Wisconsin legislators and, once a year has passed, the Governor. We will win a citizen's veto ballot initiative fight in Ohio. And we will take on the ultimate patrons of conservative politicians, the billionaire extremists like the Koch brothers and the Wall Street bankers who are providing the money and pulling the strings for this attack on the middle class.

Getting less attention than the open warfare in Wisconsin and other states, one of the most important fronts in the fight for a better economy and a stronger, rather than decimated, middle class is to keep challenging the banks. This past weekend, National People's Action has been in D.C. taking on Wall Street because the big banks’ corrupt and broken business model is at the heart of what has brought our economy to its knees, and until it gets fixed, the economy won't be fixed either. You would think these bankers — whose fraud and speculation inflated the housing bubble and then crashed our economy, who came to the American taxpayers for a bailout when they got themselves in trouble and then arrogantly rewarded themselves record bonuses while attacking any kind of regulatory reform — would at least pretend to be a little humble right now. Absolutely not. Wall Street billionaires like Pete Peterson are braying about the need for senior citizens to tighten their belts because the $14,000 the average retiree gets from Social Security is just a little too extravagant. Wall Street money is backing Republican efforts to slash Head Start and education funds, and to break the unions in Wisconsin, Ohio, and other states. These are the guys who broke the economy, but they don't want anyone to think about that, so they are pumping money into blaming teachers, cops, and firefighters for the fiscal problems of the states and federal government.

Meanwhile, when someone does try to regulate the Wall Street guys just a little, the big bank lobby loses it entirely, whines to high heaven, and begins spending money all over the place. Elizabeth Warren is under daily attack by the bankers in her very reasonable, thoughtful efforts to look out for consumers on financial issues, and the Wall Street boys' mouthpiece in the Senate, Dick Shelby, is threatening a holy war with the White House if she is nominated to run the agency. Whether the White House caves to Shelby and Wall Street's pressure will be one of the biggest signals going forward of how strong they will be in terms of taking on the big banks.

The big bank lobby also is gearing up a massively funded campaign on the swipe-fee issue, and this to me is a very telling story of just how much power Wall Street has in Washington, D.C.

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News reports from a variety of places -- and my own personal report-backs from participants at yesterday’s progressive organization leaders meeting at the White House -- indicate that the President is signaling loudly that he will stand strong on at least some of the very highest priority things that progressives care the most about in the fiscal showdown talks.

He continues to demand that the Bush tax cuts for those making over $250,000 go up; he said yesterday in the progressives meeting that Social Security was “off the table”; and he said that while he believes there can be Medicare and Medicaid savings from a variety of administrative methods, that he had no intention of cutting benefits. We don’t know how all of this is going to end up, but right now at least, the President has decided that in unity there is strength.

This doesn't come as a big surprise to me. In a conversation a couple of months back with a senior White House official, we were talking about the fiscal showdown politics, and I was emphasizing that there would be a serious civil war in the Democratic Party if Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid were cut -- that our side wasn't going to back down on this fight. His response was that the Obama team had learned from the past that the administration was in a far stronger position if they were unified with progressives, that they felt that was when they had gotten things done and had been in stronger political shape than when they had tried to triangulate things.

Now, before you get too excited about that statement or take it as gospel, keep in mind something I learned early when I worked in the Clinton White House: There is no one White House political strategy or philosophy about how to do things. There are a lot of different players in a White House, and almost always several different views on how to get things done or play things out. I’m sure there are still people in that building who think it is smart politics to pick fights with the base, or who wish the “professional left” would just go away. But I do believe that there is a clear trend in the White House toward thinking it is better for Democrats to be unified in policy fights with the Republicans, simply because they keep getting rewarded politically when they are.

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It is so much better to win than to lose, and like all other Democrats I have spent a lot of happy hours since election day reading stories about all the right wing billionaires’ and Wall Street money that was wasted, and all the Republican finger pointing and whining about why they lost.

The many losers on the Republican side were to my mind some of the people and groups who have degraded our politics and policies in the worst kind of way- the biggest names among them besides the actual candidates including Karl Rove, the Chamber of Commerce, Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brothers, the Wall Street money boys, Big Oil and Big Coal, and the extremist anti-gay and anti-choice groups. It is a pleasure to see these people, corporations, and groups unhappy for a while -- not out of any sense of vindictiveness, but just knowing that if they were feeling happy the rest of us would be suffering mightily because of their terrible agenda for America.

But there is one other set of people and groups who lost in this election as well, and it is important to note that as well: Democrats who don't want to have a populist "class warfare" kind of message.

The Obama team, after wandering for two and a half years in the unproductive vineyards of DC centrism, finally planted its flag last fall in the populist turf of Teddy Roosevelt's legacy and reframed the election as a make-or-break moment for the middle class. It campaigned aggressively on more taxes for the wealthy and more regulation for Wall Street, and ripped Romney apart on the way Bain Capital hurt its workers and out-sourced jobs.

Obama was in trouble before making that turn, but once made his poll numbers started rising and he was able to rally both the democratic base and swing vote working class voters to his side. Meanwhile, most of the Senate candidates who won tough races were flaming populists, people like the Wall Street accountabilty crusader Elizabeth Warren, the working class champion Sherrod Brown, Tammy Baldwin who bragged in her stump speeches about opposing the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the fiercely anti-big money in politics Chris Murphy, and Heidi Heitkamp, who bragged in her ads about suing big corporations as North Dakota's Attorney General.

But it wasn't just the candidates who were populists, the voters clearly were as well -- especially the swing voters. One of the most fascinating findings of post-election polling by Democracy Corps and CAF was that swing voters who ended with Obama were actually even more populist than Democratic base voters.

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In the face of five years of the deepest economic troubles this nation has seen since the 1930s that put voters in a bad mood, and veritable floodgates of millionaire money unleashed by Citizens United (far, far surpassing anything in American history), an incumbent President won a clear victory and over 50% of the vote. Except for FDR in 1936, Barack Obama is the only other Democratic President to win re-election in an economy this tough, and he is the only one except for FDR and Andrew Jackson to get over 50% of the vote. And beyond the Presidency, with Democrats having to defend over twice as many seats in the Senate as the Republicans and pundits earlier in this cycle suggesting that a Republican Senate was practically a lock- and again with all those hundreds of millions of dollars of millionaires’ money spent against them- the Democrats actually look like they will be picking up 2 seats.

This remarkable historic achievement was accomplished with the kind of old fashioned middle class populism that modern day DC sophisticates have been saying for 25 years doesn’t work anymore.

Little more than a year ago, in the fall of 2011 after an ugly deal with the Republicans on the debt ceiling that had followed 2 earlier deals with the Republicans on the budget that left a bad taste in Democrats’ mouths, the President was at his lowest point politically. His poll numbers were bad, his base was upset, the swing voters he was trying to court thought he looked weak. The re-election looked like it was in deep trouble.

But the President made the right political decision and made clear he was fighting for the American middle class and those young and poor people who were striving to get into it. He channeled his inner Teddy Roosevelt, giving a speech that was a tribute to TR that was the kickoff for a yearlong campaign firmly rooted in the hopes and aspirations of working and middle class voters. He enthusiastically embraced the car company bailout that had been so unpopular when he had first done it. He started strongly defending Obamacare after Democrats had run from it- and been pilloried with it- in 2010. He recess appointed aggressive consumer watchdog Rich Cordray to the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and asked aggressive Wall Street prosecutor Eric Schneiderman to co-chair a new task force to investigate financial fraud. He hammered the Ryan budget for voucher-izing Medicare and block-granting Medicaid and cutting taxes for the wealthy. He stuck to his guns on boldly attacking Romney’s role at Bain Capital when Wall Street friendly Democrats were calling on him to back off. He started talking about, and working on, rebuilding our manufacturing base.

It worked. Turns out that both Democratic base voters and the mostly working class swing voters liked this new populist approach. So despite those tough odds that I discussed in the first paragraph, President Obama found his rhythm and found his way. After Mitt Romney, the perfect candidate to run a populist campaign against, became the Republican nominee, the Obama campaign established a small but steady lead in the key swing states which through all the ups and downs of a long tough campaign they never relinquished.

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