Yes, Clinton made a rhetorical gesture toward the Gingrich "revolution" when he said that "the era of big government is over." As things turned out, however, that remark was studded with asterisks, footnotes, and exceptions that gave "big government" a meaning entirely different from the standard conservative interpretation. Yes, he eventually signed a welfare reform bill -- ending the family support entitlement "as we know it" -- which he had promised to do in his 1992 campaign (although he later emended many of that bill’s worst features). And yes, he sought to balance the federal budget at a time when that seemed a heresy to the Democratic base.

Yet the most important political events in the first year following the ’94 midterm were not compromises over policy, but confrontations that swiftly became disruptive, angry, polarizing -- and that Clinton won. When the Gingrich Republicans twice shut down the government at the end of 1995 in order to win their way on the budget, the president faced them down and portrayed them as right-wing extremists whose ideology portended chaos. He kept that message alive not only as he confronted the Republicans in Washington, but in a series of stealthy political commercials heralding his reelection bid that started airing in the summer of 1995, nearly a year and a half before the 1996 election.

Therein lies the pointed lesson that Obama might learn from his Democratic predecessor, and use to navigate the political and economic landscape after the midterm. What worked so well for Clinton was to recognize public concern over the leviathan of spending -- and to defend popular social, health, and environmental programs at the same time.

Similarly, Obama can acknowledge the importance of long-term deficit reduction, while challenging the Republicans to show how balance can be achieved without taxing the wealthy whose pockets they invariably protect. The answer is that it can be done only with big tax increases on everyone else and programmatic cutbacks that would raise howls of protest from many Republican constituencies -- starting with the elderly and rural voters that gave them their latest victory.

While the president need not endorse every recommendation of his bipartisan fiscal advisory commission -- dubbed the "Catfood Commission" for its expected endorsement of cuts in Social Security -- he can use their findings to insist that the House Republicans no longer attempt to "repeal arithmetic," as Clinton himself often put it during this campaign.

Against that background, Obama should insist that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), the incoming House Budget committee chair, name the specific programs that he thinks should be cut to finance continuing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest one percent.

He should make sure Ryan explains that his plan would not simply cut Medicare costs -- a feature of the health reform bill that Republicans have loudly opposed all year – but would actually abolish Medicare, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program altogether and replace those programs with inadequate private vouchers. He should tweak Ryan over the remarkable "bailout" provision in his Social Security proposal, which would leave taxpayers responsible for ensuring that privatized accounts be guaranteed against stock market declines, a vast potential liability that represents a gigantic gift to those same Wall Street houses supposedly hated by the Tea Party.

Perhaps most important, the president should ask Ryan to outline his plan for a 23 percent value-added tax -- the equivalent of a national sales tax -- while cutting taxes to historic lows for the very top brackets. He should question how the Ryan plan will reduce the deficit, when experts say it will actually make matters much worse. And he can point out that his own tax cuts, which were part of the stimulus package, were far more broad-based and fair.

By emphasizing those issues in the context of a budget-balancing debate, Obama can underline contradictions between the Tea Party radicals and the Republican establishment. By doing so, he may even tempt the Tea Party to overreach for another government shutdown, even though John Boehner (R-Ohio) , the incoming House Speaker, has vowed not to step into that trap again.

Perhaps he won’t -- and perhaps he won’t be pushed by the Tea Party. But Obama should nevertheless seek to draw contrasts at every step, using his rhetorical gifts to outline the extremist Republican policies that an overwrought and furious electorate never meant to endorse. If he can competently expose what is behind the false promises of his Congressional opponents -- who remain considerably less popular than he is -- then the fickle independents will start to turn away from them, the enthusiasm gap will shrink, and he will have taken the first step toward reelection.

"This is my 127th event," he recalled as the crowd of 1500 upstate Democrats laughed appreciatively. "And I’ve kept going because I am so concerned that in the fact-free environment of this election, people are going to choose exactly what they don’t want." That concern spurred him on a grueling, 18-hour series of jet hops from two stops in the northern reaches of his adopted state on to McKeesport, Pennsylvania, then Beckley, West Virginia, Louisville, Kentucky, and finally Orlando, Florida for a late-night rally.

The former president always draws enthusiastic crowds, and they listened raptly to his latest political pitch, which included point by point explanations of the student loan reform, healthcare reform and the banking bill to his argument that he and his fellow Democrats -- not the Republicans -- deserve the affections of the Tea Party.

Repeatedly, he complained about the "cowardice" of the "Anonymously financed advertising" that has targeted Democratic candidates, courtesy of Karl Rove and the Supreme Court -- and the real reasons why the funders of those ads want to remain unknown. "When I was growing up, my mother always told me that if I had a problem with someone, I should go straight up to them, put my shoulders back, make sure they knew my name, and say whatever I had to say -- and not sneak around behind somebody’s back," he said as he stood beside West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin, the embattled Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate. "The reason they don’t want you to know who’s paying for those ads against Joe is because if you knew who they were, it would make you more likely to vote for him."

Like most Clinton speeches, the final version of his midterm pitch included pithy riffs on broad variety of policy issues -- because, as he said later on the plane, the American people "are starving for explanations. They want someone to tell them what the hell is going on. And in the present media environment it is imperative to repeat the same message again and again for anyone to hear it."

The reason that Democrats face such dire prospects in this campaign, he continued, is that the party’s elected leaders have spent the past year enduring a crescendo of attacks from Republican politicians and right-wing media -- without answering them. He seemed mystified that the Democratic leaders had done so little to justify and promote their legislative achievements, which he has been touting at every stop. Conceding that "we made mistakes" that led to his party’s loss of 54 House seats in the 1994 midterm, he added that "now we know a midterm election can be nationalized and should act accordingly."

That is why he tried to frame the election as a set of choices between destructive Republican policies that favor "people like me, who make more than a million dollars a year" and the great majority of Americans who don’t. In full populist mode, he concluded nearly every stop with a riff on fiscal responsibility, recent presidential history, and the false consciousness of the Tea Party.

"Last weekend, I read a touching story article about two ladies who started the Tea Party movement," he said, referring to a profile in the Wall Street Journal. "They were outraged by the bailout. And who wasn’t? President Bush told me that signing the bailout made him sick."

Yet the bank reform bill pushed through by the White House and the Democrats, against Republican opposition, will "outlaw" future bailouts and make financial executives and shareholders pay if they recklessly squander their assets. "So why would the Tea Party support the Republicans, who have promised to repeal that bill because their friends on Wall Street don’t like it?" he wondered.

But beyond that, he said, the Tea Party ought to look more closely at the past 28 years of American history before they reject the Democrats and embrace the Republicans. "During the 12 years before I took office, the Republicans quadrupled the national debt," he said. "I balanced the budget after four years and left a surplus that would have erased the national debt by 2015 if they had left my budget in place." Instead, the second Bush administration doubled the national debt again, bequeathed the nation a series of future deficits -- and failed to create one-tenth as many jobs as Clinton did, while shrinking the size of government as a portion of the national economy.

And, he noted, it was President Obama and the Democrats in Congress who have actually cut taxes for most Americans in the stimulus bill -- not the Republicans. If the Tea Party movement wants more jobs, balanced budgets, lower taxes and smaller government, he insisted, they should be supporting Democrats.

"Where is the love?" he cried. "I ought to be the Tea Party's poster child."

The crowds roared every time.

Neither Stewart nor Colbert is likely to exacerbate the risk they have taken by addressing such touchy questions directly. But some Democrats believe the "crazy" label will stick to Republican candidates, especially those associated with the Tea Party movement -- and that sanity versus its opposite may well be the most effective meme to sway independent and undecided voters during the final days of the campaign.

Over the past several days, a group of progressive activists -- including Erica Payne, Billy Wimsatt, Trevor FitzGibbon and Heather Hurlburt -- has put together a hasty but creative effort to promote "Vote Sanity" as the closing argument against the Republicans. On VoteSanity.com, author and entrepreneur Wimsatt has adopted the colors and graphics of the rally logo, urging everyone going to Washington or attending one of the hundreds of satellite rallies around the country to bring "Vote Sanity" signs. (If that is too subtle, the site links directly to MoveOn.org.)

At VoteSanity.org, a site put up by the Agenda Project, there is an amusing video titled "Welcome to Crazytown" that reviews the kookiest antics of the Tea Party crowd, with the help of cartoon figures and a cuckoo clock, plus a helpful list of "ten signs someone is a complete wack-a-doodle," with linked references to Sharron Angle, Carl Paladino, Glenn Beck and Nazi SS reenactor Rich Iott, among others. 

All of this may seem either desperate or whimsical, but "Vote Sanity" is based on more than simply ripping off Comedy Central. Behind the slogan is survey research conducted recently by Drew Westen, the Emory University psychologist and author of "The Political Brain," who found swing voters strongly receptive to a one-line message: "We need leaders who hear the voice of the people, not people who just hear voices." Whether those undecided voters actually know which candidates have displayed signs of derangement is another matter. 

But that is where Stewart and Colbert could provide important guidance -- if they are sufficiently daring to "kid on the square" (as Al Franken would say) about where the anticipated GOP blowout might land us. Nobody should expect a partisan speech from these comic artists, but both can easily caricature the pretensions to fiscal responsibility, outdated nostrums, conspiracy mongering, shrill prejudice and nutso extremism that one party has exploited during this campaign.

Isn't that what they do every night? And they wouldn't even have to say "Republican." 

"With the advent of the Internet, prompt disclosure of expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in January. "This transparency enables the electorate to make informed decisions and give proper weight to different speakers and messages."

But Kennedy and the high court majority were wrong. Because of loopholes in tax laws and a weak enforcement policy at the Federal Election Commission, corporations and wealthy donors have been able to spend huge sums on campaign ads, confident the public will not know who they are, election law experts say.

Former FEC Commissioner Karl Sandstrom calls the Kennedy opinion “naïve,” saying that it reflects “a very uninformed view of how disclosure works.” Then again, neither Kennedy nor his conservative colleagues attempted to inform themselves about the realities of donor disclosure before overturning the century-old restrictions on corporate cash. But was that truly naive, or cynically partisan?

As the Justices could have discovered quite easily, the IRS code allows nonprofit groups to register as "social welfare" organizations under Section 501 c (4) -- and lets them support “independent” campaign advertising without disclosing the names of donors, so long as their “primary activity” is not political advocacy. That loophole was enlarged last August when the FEC ruled, in a divided opinion, that a donor who funds political advertising campaigns need not be disclosed unless the money was provided for a "particular advertisement." In practice, as former Republican FEC commissioner Trevor Potter told Savage, that is an impossible standard that permits any donor to remain anonymous, no matter how much he, she or (in the case of a corporation) it gives.

What is naive is to imagine that we are all concerned with civic virtue and political transparency.  Former FEC chairman Bradley Smith dispels any such illusion with a few breezy, characteristically misleading words:

"Voters do know who is funding the ads — every single one of them," he said.

Smith said the U.S. Chamber of Commerce discloses its spending on election ads, as does Rove's group, even if they do not specifically disclose their donors.

"Is there anybody who doesn't know where the chamber is coming from?" he asked. "None of this troubles me in the least."

And why would any of "this" trouble Smith, yet another Republican appointed to run a federal agency whose laws and rules he despised? The free flow of sewer money is what Republican lawyers like him have advocated for decades – ever since the Watergate scandal exposed their party’s easy access to suitcases of corporate cash.

The question is why Kennedy and the other four justices in the majority would pretend otherwise. 

These same voices have reliably exploited every chance to damage public broadcasting, not because of any supposed liberal bias, but because they disdain the straightforward, probing journalism that the public network provides every day. What the NPR haters want to see and hear on America’s airwaves is the “fair and balanced mentality” of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and Michael Savage and nothing else. After all, they hate CNN, CBS, NBC, and ABC with almost equal passion, no matter how much those networks or NPR bend over to accomodate conservative viewpoints.

Now reasonable people can certainly dispute NPR’s decision to dismiss Williams over his remarks on Fox News about fearing Muslims. Reasonable people can question the way in which NPR management handled that decision. And reasonable people can wonder whether NPR news standards place too much emphasis on objectivity. Perhaps that obsession would fade if Republicans finally succeeded in withdrawing federal funds from the network.

But like any other news organization, NPR must be free to determine its own standards and practices, which Williams had clearly violated on more than one occasion. If the network’s management believes that his expressions of befuddled opinion have compromised his stature as a “news analyst,” that should be their prerogative – without partisan interference from Congress.

Of course it is also the prerogative of public radio critics to question that decision and demand that federal funding be reduced or withdrawn. But be assured that such demands have nothing to do with protecting Williams’ right to speak freely, which he will continue to exercise for top dollar on Fox News, in the same role he has long played as a tame “liberal” (the only kind that Roger Ailes will usually tolerate on his network). What the right dislikes about NPR, aside from its dogged effort to achieve ideological balance, is its devotion to actual reporting about real issues, from campaign finance and Congressional lobbying to the Supreme Court,  the war in Afghanistan, and mine safety.

For me, the imperative is to protect one of the nation’s last, best sources of news against the partisan political abuse of a single controversial decision. Every day, NPR provides journalistic value worth far more than anything that Juan Williams will say or do if he lives for another hundred years – no, make that a thousand years.  Both the network and its local affiliates provide news and information available on no other broadcast outlets. They provide that service as fairly and honestly as any news organization in America, giving copious airtime to politicians and commentators of many stripes, including those like Newt Gingrich who have sought repeatedly to destroy them. (Their coverage of the Wiliams firing is scrupulously fair and even self-critical  -- something that will never be seen on Fox.) Moreover, their local stations foster a sense of community that offends the selfish, paranoid sensibility of the far right.

Without NPR, we would soon be left with very little on the radio that doesn’t conform to the debased worldview of Rupert Murdoch, or that fails to make money for the likes of him.

The Williams affair happens to have occurred at a moment when many NPR stations are in the midst of seasonal fundraising. With that coincidence comes an unusual opportunity. I’ve been a regularly contributing member of my local NPR station for many years; but this week, I’m going to give a few dollars more. Everybody who prefers real reporting to propaganda parading as journalism can ante up, too.

Dated September 24, 2010 and signed by Koch himself on company stationery, the letter urges recipients to join “our network of business and philanthropic leaders, who are dedicated to defending our free society” – and specifically to attend the group’s next meeting at a Palm Springs resort in late January. Most revealing is an attached brochure about the network’s most recent meeting, which occurred in Aspen last June 27-28.

According to that document, the Palm Springs meeting attracted such corporate and financial titans as Stephen Schwartzman of the Blackstone Group, Philip Anschutz of Anschutz Industries, and Steve Bechtel of Bechtel Corp., as well as representatives of Bank of America, Allied Capital, Citadel Investment, among many others – all of whom gathered to learn how to “elect leaders who are more strongly committed to liberty and prosperity” with a “strategic plan to educate voters on the importance of economic freedom.”

Explaining the network’s plan for November and beyond were David Chavern, second in command at the US Chamber of Commerce; Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity; Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University; and Gretchen Hamel, the former Bush administration official who runs Public Notice, a group launched last spring under mysterious auspices to attack government spending.

But conservative journalists were the true stars of that June meeting, notably Washington Post columnist and Fox News pundit Charles Krauthammer (who spoke at a mountaintop dinner on “What’s Ahead for America?”), the National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru, syndicated columnist and author Michael Barone, and Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal editorial board. Glenn Beck of Fox News – who has lately been defending the Chamber of Commerce as advocates of “the little guy” – is also listed as a “presenter.”

Nobody was supposed to talk about the meeting, as the brochure's “Confidentiality and Security” section emphasizes, so nobody was meant to know that Krauthammer, Ponnuru, Barone, Moore and Beck were flown out to Aspen, lodged in luxury accommodations, and presumably paid a handsome honorarium by Koch to entertain and enlighten the would-be saviors of the Republic. But now we know. So where are the guardians of media integrity, who made so much noise about the innocuous jawing of the liberals on Journolist?

Still more troubling is the same brochure’s boast that Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia have addressed past meetings of the Koch network. Why would two Supreme Court justices show up at a secret conclave of far-right activists and corporate lobbyists, impairing the transparency and impartiality of the nation's highest court? This is a much more important story than that harebrained harassing phone call by Virginia Thomas to Anita Hill.