The press is swooning over John Edwards, while business is pushing the panic button.

American politics is at an inflection point, where the redistributionist force that corporate America fears most isn’t Big Government, but rather Big Litigation.

Meanwhile, the media are in love. “A New Romance” was the headline above media-beat reporter Howard Kurtz’s piece in the Washington Post last week. As Kurtz observed, “The loudest message from the punditocracy was that the North Carolinian was the best running mate out there, and Kerry would be crazy not to pick him.” John Kerry took that punditocratic advice.

What’s Edwards’ appeal? Part of it is looks. This is a television world, after all; Edwards is anchorman-handsome. And part of it is partisanship; since most reporters root for Democrats, they want to see a strong ticket with national reach, especially in the South.

But another part of the appeal is what can be called “elitist populism” — activist, redistributionist government. And in these days, it is spurred on not by voters and elected officials, but instead by lawyers and lawsuits.

Once upon a time, politicians preaching “soak the rich” and “bust the trusts” would get elected and enact laws to achieve their ends. At the beginning of the 20th century, left-leaning pols succeeded at two huge goals: the Justice Department broke up John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil monopoly, and the Constitution was amended to allow for the progressive income tax.

Today, not so many people have faith that the federal government in Washington can make things better. Moreover, the lobbies looking out for corporate power and private wealth have set up formidable roadblocks to lefty political action.

But the popular impulse toward regulation and redistribution hasn’t disappeared. It has merely taken on a new form: Today’s leading left-ivists aren’t politicians; they are trial lawyers. It’s the tort bar that has turned trial lawyering into an income-transferring mechanism rivaling the government. According to the Manhattan Institute, trial lawyers targeting everything from Big Tobacco to the Big Mac have created a $200-billion-a-year money churn that yields $40 billion a year in revenues for attorneys.

And the media mostly love it. Why not? Both lawyers and journalists are a high-end bunch these days — lots of income, lots of education. It’s common to find reporters who have law degrees; it’s even more common to find reporters who are married or related to lawyers.

To such folk, the private litigators taking on Wal-Mart — today’s equivalent of Standard Oil — are merely filling a vacuum. Thus, journos have been cheering as the company — much disliked for its conservative culture and anti-union stance — has been hit with a potentially zillion-dollar class-action suit, filed by private litigators on behalf of female employees. And so what if trial lawyers, as a result, take in billions in contingency fees? As Fourth Estaters shrug, that’s just the way the system works.

Big Business, meanwhile, hates all this suing. Tom Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, issued a call to arms in last week’s Wall Street Journal. But corporate America has been trying to put the litigation explosion back in its box for a quarter-century now, and it has failed at every occasion, thwarted by the legal-reportorial counter-coalition. Interestingly, there’s not much room for blue-collar workers in this new world in which litigators raise the price of making things in America — but those ordinary folks, of course, are a shrinking part of the power equation.

Enter John Edwards. Yes, the North Carolinian was working-class born, but after winning $175 million in courtroom judgments — leaving him with a personal fortune some estimate at $38 million — he lives in Georgetown now, in the bosom of Powertown. And to his neighboring D.C. reporters, he’s a Southern-fried mirror image of themselves — a white-collar professional, someone who reveres courts and judges just as they do, someone who is out to Do Good.

Which is to say, Edwards’ press honeymoon is going to last for a while. And he might be able to carry John Kerry with him over the threshold.