In the midst of all the chicken little gloom and doom

THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

Either word-torturer Frank Luntz has been writing memos to the brass and issuing orders to the troops again, or the GOP is taking its verbal cues from none other than the certifiable Alan Keyes.

Have you noticed? "Radical" is the new socialist, the new liberal, the creeping unhinged hyperbole suitable for all occasions in describing President Obama's budget proposal. It's now conservative chic, simply all the rage: big-government "liberal" is so yesterday.

Gee, it's almost as if someone -- listening, Frank? -- has focus-grouped the lingering efficacy of again hauling out that old "liberal" bogeyman, only to find that most voters no longer care. After partaking of the desolating fruits of right-wing rule for so long, if liberal is its antithesis, then bring it on, they say.

They're finally numb to the right's tireless stigmatization of the word; hence a new one -- one with more shock-value kick to it -- was desperately needed. And "Radical" must have pegged the bogeyman-o-meter.

Never mind that what Obama now proposes is more or less the same he proposed for roughly two years on the campaign trail; and above all never mind that what he proposes is far more organically pragmatic than schematically liberal. For the right, debate is all about innovative exaggeration and ominous labeling -- "framing" remains the hot-button word for the partisan presentation of hot-button issues -- since an honest argument carries the insufferable risk of losing it.

Yes, I know the word has been thrown about by the right for some time now, or, to pinpoint its origination in application to Obama, since the fizzled phenomenon of William Ayers. But it was just yesterday that I noticed on the Sunday talk shows the word's almost Post-It-reminder-note-on-the-forehead usage by the distinguished gentlemen from the GOP.

The president is engaging in radical exercises, intoned the increasingly preprogrammed Sen. Lindsey Graham on "Meet the Press," oblivious to the profoundly non-radical nature of, say, even corporate support for some form of universal health care. Nor is equal opportunity of education -- so that, perhaps, just maybe, this nation can compete more effectively in the global rat race of capitalism -- customarily regarded by political theorists as Leninist to its core.

But hey, it's a lot more fun to bend reality when reality is incompatible with one's political agenda; and, of course, in this crowded age of competing messages, the bending must be done with overwhelming force and unprecedented volume.

Later, during MTP's roundtable discussion, the solemn consensus among three-fourths of the four-member panel was that the restoration of American confidence is indispensable as the first step in the restoration of the American economy.

Then came Panel Member Number Four, Newt Gingrich, the Big Idea Man, blasting away at -- any guesses? -- yep, Obama's radicalism. It was segment two; removed was the cardboard cut-out of Lindsey and installed was the cardboard cut-out of Newt. Yet the viewer would have hardly noticed the change in personnel. Both were reading from the same Orwellian Luntzism -- Obama's "radicalism" is double ungood.

What was Newt's alternative Big Idea? What, I hear you ask, was his counterproposition for solving what his party has created in the monstrous form of nearly insoluble problems?

Well, he didn't have one. Not one, not even a little Big Idea. Not even a whiff of one. Instead, he wanted us only to know that Obama's radicalism was undermining the very confidence that Newt's fellow panelists sought.

Newt wasn't doing that, mind you. Obama is, or rather, his radicalism is -- which at any rate just won't work, because it's too big in purpose, it's too challenging, it's simply too much for the American people to handle.

As I listened to Graham's rehearsed shock and awe, then Gingrich's, then a bit later Sen. Richard Shelby's strikingly similar exasperation on ABC's "This Week," it occurred to me that what now underlies the conservative argument is the precise opposite of what conservatives have argued for decades: that given a big enough challenge, Americans can accomplish anything -- but first, the gauntlet must be thrown.

I heard none of that yesterday. What I did hear was rote defeatism -- that determined countermeasures to undo what the right has wrought are doomed as radical impossibilities. In short, conservatives of Ronald Reagan's American Mornings are now banking on utmost despair, trusting that Americans will prefer that to "radical exercises."

And that's quite the seismic shift in their own message, a shift even greater than the one they're trying to impose on Obama's.

In the midst of all the chicken little gloom and doom

The GOP's new message: Despair