In a comment thread, I posed the following question:

So here’s the hard part: how do we engage in pressure tactics on Democrats (or any majority party) without being so extreme as to make ourselves irrelevant?

There was a time when the extremist groups served a really good purpose: to make the not-so-extremist groups seem moderate. I’m wondering if we can find a way to use the extremist rhetoric of the impeachment groups to our advantage.

When I was living in Rhode Island as part of the gay rights group there, we were trying to figure out how to push the legislature to not treat us as extremists.  One suggestion was that we create a genuine extremist group: a chapter of Queer Nation and present a choice to the legislature: you can interact with the raving lunatics banging at the door, or you can listen to us, the rational people who want equal rights.

It didn’t matter much that some of the people in that room having the nice, rational, discussion, were also some of the same people sometimes out there banging at the door, because that wasn’t the point.  The point was that sometimes you can push the debate in a fashion which makes your point of view more moderate.

Republicans have been doing this for at least thirty years now, and they’ve done a good job of it, at least in some areas.  Focus on the Family can appear more moderate in comparison to Fred Phelps. 

On the left, this seems to have happened with civil unions.  Thinking about how much vicious resistance there was to civil unions in Vermont at the time, it’s amazing that now civil unions are now the moderate, mainstream choice.  I remember watching that unfold while watching the legislature in MA wrestle with the issue only to discover that many of the anti-marriage folks were pushing for civil unions and saying that of -course- same-sex couples deserve equal rights, but not to call it marriage.

So if we’ve got people out there being self-righteous and arrogant about impeachment, how can we use it to our advantage?  How can we frame the issue in a way which is useful, as opposed to condescending and ineffective?