MAD AS HELL.

Regular viewers of "Lou Dobbs Tonight," on CNN, might be surprised at the venue that Dobbs chose for lunch not long ago: the Grill Room of the Four Seasons, a midtown bastion of the very same political and business "elites" that he denounces daily on his television program. The Four Seasons is the enduring commissary of the Old Guard, where Henry Kissinger waves to the former Citigroup C.E.O. Sandy Weill, there is limo-lock at the side door, and the regulars have their checks sent to the office. Dobbs's Town Car left him at the door, on East Fifty-second Street, and the restaurant's co-owner, Julian Nicolini, embraced him that day as warmly as when he welcomed, among others, Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman and C.E.O. of the Blackstone Group; Nelson Peltz, the C.E.O. of Trian Partners; Edgar Bronfman, Sr., the former chairman and C.E.O. of Seagram; and Mortimer Zuckerman, the real-estate developer and publisher of the News. Nicolini led Dobbs to one of five choice banquettes, and Dobbs settled in, looking very much at home.

Dobbs is sixty-one, and his chubby face has a rosy glow. His blond hair is lacquered in place, his black wing tips are impeccably buffed. Other club members having lunch that day--the Nobel Prize winner James Watson, Bronfman, Peltz, the movie producer Harvey Weinstein--stopped at the table to say hello. It is the kind of welcome that one might have expected for an earlier incarnation of Lou Dobbs--the Harvard-educated anchor of CNN's "Moneyline," which in the nineteen-nineties served as a sort of video clubhouse for corporate America. But, in the past four years or so, Dobbs has been reborn as a populist--a full-throated champion of "the little guy," an evangelical opponent of liberal immigration laws. His hour-long program, which airs at six, features Dobbs in a role that combines Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan. On the air, he boomingly assails the upper management of corporate America for its "outrageous" greed, pay packages, and corruption, its opposition to increasing the minimum wage, its hiring of "illegal aliens," its ties to "Communist China," and its eagerness to send American jobs overseas.

The new Lou Dobbs often surprises those who recall the old Lou Dobbs of "Moneyline." Daniel Henninger, the deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, wrote, "Old admirers are aghast. It's as if whatever made Linda Blair's head spin around in 'The Exorcist' had invaded the body of Lou Dobbs and left him with the brain of Dennis Kucinich," a reference to the left-wing Ohio congressman and former Presidential aspirant. After an angry altercation on the show with James Glassman, a former New Republic publisher and current conservative supply-sider, Glassman said of Dobbs, "How did he transform from a business sycophant to a raving populist?" Glassman's answer was that Dobbs had begun to "demagogue these issues." (In questioning Glassman's economic theories on his program, Dobbs accused him of talking "like a cult member.") As if to answer such critics, Dobbs has recently published a book whose title is almost as long as the menu at the Grill Room: "War on the Middle Class: How the Government, Big Business, and Special Interest Groups Are Waging War on the American Dream and HOW TO FIGHT BACK."

On the cover, Dobbs is standing--hands in pockets, feet apart--like a sentry protecting the boundaries of decency and the nation. At CNN, alone among the cable network's anchors, he is allowed to express his opinions without borders. "I'm never neutral on any issue that affects the common good, our national interest, and working men and women of this country," he writes. In many ways, Dobbs and Bill O'Reilly, of Fox News, who in 2003 wrote a book entitled "Who's Looking Out for You?," are kindred spirits. Dobbs, who lives on a three-hundred-acre farm in a prosperous part of New Jersey, admires his own capacity for compassion and self-effacement. His audience, he writes, knows that he cares "more about them and their lives than about being invited to the White House or playing golf with C.E.O.s and celebrities."

For most of its first half hour, "Lou Dobbs Tonight" contains more domestic and international news than does each of the three major network's broadcasts, and Dobbs fills the role of the well-informed anchorman. Yet he also teases his audience, with headlines from stories that run in the second half hour, which is dominated by what Dobbs's executive producer, Jim McGinnis, refers to as "brands"--segments with names like "Broken Borders," "Homeland Insecurity," "War on the Middle Class," "Exporting America," and "The Best Government Money Can Buy."

"It's very different from any program you'll see on TV, by intention," Dobbs said, as we ordered the fifty-six-dollar Dover sole. "What you won't see on our broadcast is 'fair and balanced journalism.' You will not see 'objective journalism.' The truth is not 'fair and balanced.' There is a nonpartisan, independent reality that doesn't give a damn, frankly, what two Democrats and two Republicans think about anything or say about anything."

The cable-news universe is relatively small. About eight hundred thousand people watch "Lou Dobbs Tonight" (about nine million watch the "Nightly News," on NBC), and in its time slot it lags behind Brit Hume's show, on Fox, which has about a million and a half viewers. But Dobbs is narrowing the gap, and his news program is one of the handful on cable whose audiences are growing, rather than shrinking. The highest-rated cable news program is "The O'Reilly Factor," on Fox, which averages about two million viewers, and Fox continues to lead CNN in the ratings, with MSNBC a distant third. A program's ranking is affected by the length of time that viewers stay with it, and news shows that do best tend to have opinionated anchors, like Fox's O'Reilly and Sean Hannity; MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, whose audience has ...