Cornering the right; it's about bloody time

Yesterday morning, after writing a column about "driv[ing] one of those famous Rovian wedges straight into the heart of the latest manifestation of 'movement' conservatism" -- the Tea Party phenomenon, I clicked on Politico and was delighted to find the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee already planning a similar blitzkrieg.

Delighted, not only because the DSCC and its chairman, Sen. Robert Menendez, appear earnest and timely in their freshly designed offensive, but mostly because it is an offensive -- not some conventional defensive maneuver full of rational responses to irrational assaults, for which Democrats are so notorious.

They are, instead, aggressively taking the fight to the right-wing flanks.

Wrote Politico: "Showing that they’ve learned the lesson of Massachusetts" -- and Virginia, and New Jersey, and New York, and in fact every Independent-studded district or state recently captivated by the demagogic simplifications of ultraconservatism -- the DSCC is issuing a memo "advising Democratic campaign managers to frame their opponents early -- and to drive a wedge between moderate voters and tea-party-style conservatives."

The memo itself -- noting "the pressure Republican candidates feel from the extreme right in their party" -- urges the imposition of a kind of internal pincer movement simply by getting Republican "opponents on the record."

Either they cater to the extremists, and thereby lose the general-election-voting Middle; or they embrace the Middle, and lose the primary-voting extremists.

It's a brilliant squeeze play, accomplished by publicly thrusting a few direct questions at GOP candidates. Again, from the memo:

"Do you believe that Barack Obama is a U.S. citizen? Do you think the 10th Amendment bars Congress from issuing regulations like minimum health care coverage standards? Do you think programs like Social Security and Medicare represent socialism and should never have been created in the first place? Do you think President Obama is a socialist? Do you think America should return to a gold standard?"

I am especially fond of Questions 2 & 3, in that any equivocation by a GOP candidate automatically casts that candidate as a suspect-socialist in extremists' eyes -- just another big-spending, big-government Republican. But they also deal with matters of intense contemporary interest and acute public policy, on which the Middle tends to chronically disagree with ultraconservatives.

Go ahead, dear GOPers; go ahead and merely imply that putting Grandma on Medicare was a Leninist plot to bring about our national ruination. Then see how far you get in the general election.

The instant celebrity of such questioning was delightfully revealed as early as last night on MSNBC's "The Ed Show." There, Mr. Schultz put these questions to former House Republican and current Heritage Foundation propagandist Ernest Istook, and the latter, a regular guest, squirmed -- he literally squirmed. His hesitations and obscurantist reformulations were dangerous indications of ultraconservative apostasy, and he knew it.

But how could he give the libertarian boot to Grandma? Grandma votes, as will, likely, many of her progeny, who aren't required to pick up all of her medical bills, thanks to that Leninist-plotting Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Ever since Democrats communized the U.S. under Roosevelt and then lost China and were made to answer for these and other national and geopolitical crimes, they have increasingly played some exasperating version of defense. Concomitantly, it's been an invention of modern American politics that Republicans aren't expected to answer questions; they don't "do" defense, they always attack.

But now the worm -- always immensely turn-able -- is turning. If Democrats, with unprecedented aggression, will force Republican candidates to answer these few simple questions with simple Yeses or Nos, the latter will come across as either preposterously antique to the Middle or radically liberal to their Base.

It's squeeze plays like this that make old-school politics a thing of Platonic beauty.