But the populist candidate who claims to speak for the “people” — against some political straw man such as big business or big government — has a long history. ~Michael Cohen

Perhaps I have missed something, but since when have real things that real voters have complaints against count as examples of “some political straw man”?  There is such a thing as big business, and there is such a thing as big government, and citizens have legitimate complaints with both.  That the populist might conceivably exaggerate the errors of either does not make his targets “straw men.”  An easy target for criticism is not a “political straw man.”  The populist may attribute ill intentions to agents of business and government that they do not have, but even if the story the populist tells is a fable it does not change the reality of the results of decisions taken by business and government.  The populist may simplify a complex phenomenon to an easily digestible narrative of some powerful few who have ushered in ruinous policies, but that doesn’t mean that some relatively powerful few haven’t actually ushered in ruinous policies resulting in some of the things the populist is describing.  Fundamentally, populism at its best attacks concentrations of wealth and power that are inimical to free government.  Populism becomes incoherent when it attacks one manifestation of concentrated wealth and power (multinationals) while pretending that consolidated, centralised government “works for the people,” just as attacks on centralised government ultimately get nowhere if they cannot be expanded to include a critique of corporate power.  That would be a broad and unifying message, and it is something that Obama (who is the actual subject of the article) is not using.

The real “political straw men” deployed most often in American politics are such demonised things as “isolationism” and “xenophobia.”  These are “straw men” because no one actually advocates either (non-interventionists aren’t really isolationists at all, and virtually no one in American history has been an actual isolationist, even if we sometimes allow the label to be used) and the labels work to make a policy position politically radioactive.  These are the pejorative descriptions by people who are caricaturing and demonising their opponents in foreign policy, trade and immigration debates.  Messrs. Bush and McCain have deployed them often over the last few years, defining everyone outside of their circle of political allies with one of these pejorative terms, and then proceeding to knock down the straw men they have set up with arguments that are very nearly as bad as this: “Some isolationists think that we should cede half our country to Bin Laden, but I think that is wrong,” or “Some xenophobes may want to drown all immigrants in the sea, but I think we’re a better country than that.”  Of course, it is the side of the debate that has the fewest good arguments that most often resorts to using these straw men, which is why the people allied with forces of concentrated power and wealth use them so very often.