The most striking impression from the debate among the Democrats Thursday was how they perceive America. The theme of the debate was the economy. They spent their energy trying to outdo one and other in their description of American misery. There was Enron, Halliburton, unemployment, lost jobs, embedded wealth, and entrenched poverty. “They’ve lost more jobs in the last two and a half years than the last 11 presidents put together,” Rep. Richard Gephardt said. You would think they were talking about Calcutta. Senator Kerry remarked that “Democrats can’t love jobs and hate the people who create them.” Save for Mr. Kerry’s bleat, it would be hard to point to even the slightest glimmer of affection for job-creating corporate America. One can see where the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Ed Gillespie, is coming from when he tells the New York Times today: “They have adopted harsh, bitter, personal attacks as their approach. They are a party of protest and pessimism and offer no positive agenda of their own.”

Enron warranted six mentions during the debate, Halliburton four, and that catch-all “greed” snagged another four mentions. It goes without saying that none of these was a complimentary invocation. Not one of the Democrats, as our Ira Stoll pointed out in a dispatch in Friday’s New York Sun, named a single corporation that he or she admired. America has an “ethos of greed,” said Senator Moseley Braun (whose tenure in office was not exactly an exercise in ethics). Senator Lieberman averred that America’s economy has a problem with a “culture of greed and irresponsibility.”The Reverend Sharpton pointed to “greed and runaway deregulation” as the cause of our deficit. Mr. Gephardt worried that “Greed, selfishness can kill this great democracy and ruin capitalism.”

Not that anyone on the stage seemed worried about the possibility that capitalism might be ruined. The self-hating aristocrat, Governor Dean, discussing Richard Grasso’s departure from the New York Stock Exchange, said that “Corporate America has lost touch with the average Americans’ concern in this country. And until they get that touch back, we’re going to have this big divide and need for supervision of issues like salary and pension reform.” The battle cry was, Destroy capitalism to save it. While there were the usual denials that they were playing with class warfare, almost every candidate decried President Bush’s tax cuts for “the rich” on the backs of the “middle class.” Mr. Gephardt complained of a president “brought to office by the millionaires.”

None of the candidates articulated a vision or a program for America — either for its economy or overseas. Most of the Democratic candidates would repeal the president’s tax cuts, though Messrs. Kerry and Lieberman said they would leave them in place for the middle class. All that the 10 seem to have in common is an enemy. “We need to remember that the enemy here is George Bush, not each other,” Mr. Dean said. The line was greeted with applause. It’s not a stirring vision, to be sure, but it’s the Democrats’ America.