CraigieB's comment quoting William Jenning Bryan's famous "Cross of Gold" speech is fabulously appropriate here:
"If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world. Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns.
You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."
As an aside:
I am constantly astounded by the ironic mutuation that characterizes the history of the major political parties in America. The modern day inheritor & exemplar of Bryan's "common man" populist rhetoric can be none other than Sarah Palin: so alike, and yet so different. The Great Commoner, Bryan, and the Common Sense Solution-ator, Palin, are both committed supporters of popular democracy, firebrand rhetoricians, devoutly religious and Creationist refuseniks of the Theory of Evolution. But Bryan was the archetypal liberal big D Democrat, and Palin an avatar for the hard-right conservative wing of the Republicons.
Now that she's ostensibly climbed the learning curve of macroeconomic policy - e.g., see her Twitter & Facebook inveighing against the Fed's QE2 program - how long before we can expect Sarah Palin to invert Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech on its head?
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