WASHINGTON — The thrashing of BP this week, in private meetings at the White House and in public hearings on Capitol Hill, was perhaps the most direct confrontation to date between governing Democrats and a corporate behemoth, but it was hardly the first.

In fact, at least partly in response to economic unrest he inherited, President Barack Obama himself has established a remarkable pattern of regularly scolding the titans of American industry.

Last year, he derided reluctant lenders as "fat cats" and called the bonuses of AIG executives an "outrage"; more recently, he attacked health insurers as greedy and accused the owners of a West Virginia mining company of putting "their bottom line before the safety of their workers."

Taken together, such public indictments would seem to make Obama’s administration the most populist, at least in its rhetoric, since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s.

And yet, somehow, the only potent grassroots movement to emerge from this moment of dissatisfaction with America’s economic elite exists not in support of the president or his party, but far to the right instead, in the form of the so-called Tea Party rebellions that are injecting new energy into the Republican cause. If Obama has so consistently cast himself as the populist scourge of corporate abusers, then why does so much of the popular anger seem to be directed at him instead?

In part, this is probably because Obama, while seemingly eager to read from a populist script, is really too cool and contemplative to be terribly convincing in the role. For sheer intensity of emotion, the president hardly rivals even the more patrician John F. Kennedy, who complained after a run-in with steelmakers that all businessmen were in fact "sons of bitches," as his father had counseled him.

Obama’s aides like to describe him as privately furious at one corporation or another, but the president seems more like a school kid whose friends are holding him back from a hallway fight, screaming "Let me at him!" but not really relishing the idea.

But there is something more fundamental going on, too, an underlying shift in the meaning of American populism. Most Democrats, after all, persist in embracing populism as it existed in the early part of the last century — that is, strictly as a function of economic inequality. In this worldview, the oppressed are the poor, and the oppressors are the corporate interests who exploit them.

That made sense 75 years ago, when a relatively small number of corporations — oil and coal companies, steel producers, car makers — controlled a vast segment of the work force and when government was a comparatively anemic enterprise. In recent decades, however, as technology has reshaped the economy, more and more Americans have gone to work for smaller or more decentralized employers, or even for themselves, while government has exploded in size and influence. (It’s not incidental that the old manufacturing unions, like the autoworkers and steelworkers, have been eclipsed in membership and political influence by those that represent large numbers of government workers.)

Since this transformation took place, a succession of liberal politicians — Jesse Jackson, Jerry Brown, John Edwards — have tried to run for president on a traditionally populist, anti-corporate platform, with little success. That is because today’s only viable brand of populism, the same strain that Ross Perot expertly tapped as an independent presidential candidate in 1992, is not principally about the struggling worker versus his corporate master. It is about the individual versus the institution — not only business, but also government and large media and elite universities, too.

You do not have to be working for the minimum wage, after all, to seethe about the effects of the Wall Street meltdown on your retirement savings or the spilled oil creeping toward your shores. You simply have to fear that large institutions generally exercise too much power and too little responsibility in society.

This new American populism is why the federal deficit has emerged as a chief concern for voters, as it did in Perot’s era — not because it presents an imminent crisis of its own, necessarily, but because it signifies a kind of institutional recklessness, a disconnectedness from the reality of daily life.

The same dynamic explains the current spate of questions over the composition of the Supreme Court, which may soon consist entirely of lawyers trained at Harvard and Yale. It does not seem to matter that virtually all of those justices advanced from the middle class, rather than through inheritance. The pervasive reach of exclusive educational institutions is unnerving to some Americans now, and it helps inspire the caustic brand of populism that Sarah Palin and others have made central to their political identities.

What this means for Obama is that an anxious populace is now less likely to see his clash with BP as an instance of government’s standing up to a venal corporation, but rather as an instance of both sprawling institutions having once again failed to protect them. In a poll conducted last month by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, 63 percent of respondents rated BP’s handling of the oil leak as fair or poor. But the government fared only modestly better, with 54 percent giving it the same dismal marks.

In other words, voters perceive both business and government as part of an interdependent system, and it is hard for them to separate out the culpability of either. Obama acknowledged as much in his speech Tuesday, when he asserted — in his lone criticism of government’s role in the crisis — that the bureau in charge of monitoring the oil companies had effectively been colluding with them instead.

All of which leaves the old kind of anti-corporate populism — "the people versus the powerful," as Al Gore put it — a beat behind the times, sort of like "flower power" or the Laffer Curve. Obama and his party are probably right to presume that voters don’t trust BP or any of the powerful companies the president has taken to castigating on a regular basis. The problem is that they don’t trust Washington to stand up for them, either.

© 2010 The New York Times Company