Tuesday Wisconsin Recall Elections Test Grover Norquist Vision, GOP Tactics

Let's be clear: the Right's goal in Wisconsin and elsewhere is to unwind the New Deal, demonize The Great Society, and as the ultra-conservative power-broker Grover Norquist has put it, shrink Government to fit into a bathtub and drown it.

And wants to replace it with a fetishized, hands-off, "I've Got Mine, Jack" approach to governing itself through a loop that pre-eminently protects corporate power and high-earners (thank you, Citizens United), further marginalizes minorities (through Voter ID, registration barriers), manipulates workers as scapegoats (collective bargaining is bad, public school  teachers are the enemy), privatizes whenever and wherever it can (contributors and sponsors, line up here!) and mines the middle-class for taxes from which high earners and corporate coffers are increasingly exempt (see: Scott Walker/George Bush tax breaks, and the Tea Party-engineered debt-ceiling deal).

And uses astroturf activists as foot soldiers, while the Tea Party founders and funders and spinners have convinced everyday conservatives that their movement is more about Joe the Plumber than David Koch.

Recalled suburban Milwaukee Republican State Senator Alberta Darling's move to the Right, her role this year as Joint Finance Committee co-chair, and subsequent Senate recall defense in which ends have repeatedly justified her means [update: Darling survived, though two of her GOP colleagues did not] offers an instructive template as well as a case study:

To be a Republican these days means making a hard Right turn, serving special interests, then raising a jaw-dropping fortune from conservative, corporate interests to defend yourself - - and get gifted just in case with a fail-safe, re-mapped District by her colleagues and their taxpayer-paid lawyers that is stacked with entire, fresh Republican neighborhoods, if needed, to smooth any and all re-elections.

Democrats and progressives, as Eugene Robinson has argued, will need a new Big, Throw-The-Bums-Out Idea that is rooted in fairness and justice for all - - in the economy and the law.

An idea and movement that is stronger and deeper than Grover Norquist's "No New Taxes" pledge- - but to have it catch on, things may have to get even worse, for more people, before the Bums are given their rush.

Let's hope it doesn't come to that, with Tuesday being the beginning of the turnaround. The opportunity is there.