I hope an important piece out today from Ed Kilgore, James Vega, and J.P. Green gets plenty of attention. They argue that the Republican Party has embraced a “politics as warfare” approach – not Tea Party, grass roots Republicans, but elite Washington politicians and operatives. I have a few criticisms I could make, but their point about the “establishment” is a good one: there’s a tendency to assume that it’s always the yahoos out there in the country somewhere that are the problem, but what’s wrong with the Republican Party now is very much about their leaders, not the rank-and-file.

On to the other good stuff:

1. I realize it’s not exactly news, but related to the point above, Newt Gingrich remains a blowhard and a demagogue, as Luke Johnson reports.

2. Dean Baker doesn’t believe in the military spending fairy, and doesn’t think you should either: “During a downturn where there are lots of unemployed workers, any government spending will create jobs, regardless of whether or not it is on the military.”

3. If you want to know How Rick Perry’s Tax Plan Would Affect You, see Catherine Rampell’s tables from the Tax Policy Center.

4. And Steve Benen catches Perry promising to provide recession-level job growth if only you’ll elect him.

5. I highly recommend E.J. Graff’s essay on abortion, choice, and a pro-choice view of celebrating life. Today’s must-read, whether you agree or not.

6. Family farms are still not in danger from estate taxes, as Paul Waldman reminds us.

7. A very useful clarification on how many Americans will have health insurance once (and if) ACA is fully implemented, from Sarah Kliff.

8. Justin Elliot talks to Michael Kazin about the Occupy movement.

9. The key difference between the Occupy folks and the anti-globalization movement in the 1990s? Matt Yglesias is right; the Occupy stuff is just better policy analysis.

10. Ari Berman follows up Greg’s epic takedown with more about Paul Ryan: Class Warrior for the Wealthy.

11. Paul Krugman doesn’t see why politicians shouldn’t talk about the effects of the other party’s policies.

12. Atrios adds an excellent point to what Krugman said.

13. Kevin Drum positions GOP tax rhetoric squarely within the culture war, a good theme he’s been pushing recently.  I think he’s right, although it’s important to remember that GOP tax policy really has produced lower rates for rich people, and will no doubt do so again should President Romney or Perry have Republican Congress. Even if the more fanciful ideas are going nowhere.

14. Mark Bluthenthal finds that GOP party actors are whistling past the graveyard; they don’t see Herman Cain as an electoral loser should he get nominated. Interesting.

15. Updates on war-on-voting items around the country from Amy Friend.

16. And Dave Weigel explains how hits on Elizabeth Warren work.

A quick update on the Joint Select (Super) Committee: Its work marches on, with reports today that the Democrats have made a new offer for larger deficit reductions than the deficit deal required, but without increases in the Medicare age eligibility that liberals oppose. Republicans are rejecting this overture as a stunt designed to position Dems for the political battle that will come if the supercommittee fails.

Here’s what you need to know about this: There’s no reason at all to expect any deal in the end, because nothing has really changed. As long as Republicans refuse to consider any tax increases, there’s just not going to be a grand bargain.

And there’s no reason at all to expect Republicans to agree to tax increases; even if the committee did, their bill would be dead on arrival in the House. As near as I can tell, the Democrats would be willing to negotiate a deal if one were available, and even give up some liberal priorities in order to win other things, but Republicans just aren’t interested: there’s nothing they care about that they would be willing to sacrifice lower taxes on the wealthy for. Sure, some Republicans really oppose defense cuts, and if there’s no deal it’s possible that down the line the trigger will actually take effect and those cuts will happen, but they would prefer even that to having to vote for tax increases. And clearly none of them considers the federal budget deficit to be anywhere near as important to keeping high-end taxes low.

So what we’re seeing with today’s developments isn’t about bargaining, it’s about the spin both parties hope to take away from the deadlock. And for the Democrats that is once again a main course of reasonableness (they’re willing to cut a deal if only Republicans were willing) along with healthy side dishes of increased taxes on rich folks and new job creation measures. In other words, the items Barack Obama has been talking about that have been polling well for the last several weeks.

But as far as cutting a deal, we’ve seen that Republicans have some leverage when they have a sufficiently large and immediate hostage, but not otherwise. They don’t have any hostage on the Joint Select Committee, where neither side is particularly worried about cuts, since they won’t be triggered until after the election. The lack of a hostage means Dems don’t need to cave on tax hikes. The real action will occur when appropriations run out and the threat of a government shutdown returns. That’s the point at which we’ll probably get some real bargaining, and we’ll see whether Obama is going to be willing to risk a shutdown over Tea Party demands. But as long as Republicans refuse to entertain the idea of the wealthy paying a bit more in taxes, the supercommittee will just fizzle.

Kudos to Rick Perry’s campaign team: the birther gambit was smart politics. Perry raised questions about Barack Obama’s legitimacy over the weekend just before he rolled out his new tax plan, and is now retreating from his flirtation with that particular fringe, saying that he was just joking. Deliberate or not, it was a smart strategy that fit nicely with Perry’s oddball situation in the race for the GOP nomination. Yes, he took a hammering from liberals, and even a few conservatives, but ultimately that will help more than it will hurt.

Perry’s problem is an unusual one. By most objective measures, including fundraising, endorsements, the quality of his campaign operations, and perhaps even the professionalism of his policy program, he’s in a very solid second place in the Republican race, behind only a frontrunner who many in the party may not be willing to accept as their nominee. But thanks to a series of awful debate performances, a couple of serious gaffes (including a major one on the hot-button issue of immigration), and the goofy way that the media and rank-and-file Republicans are handling the contest so far, he’s fallen so far back in the polls that many have written him off. That’s dangerous; no matter how well the rest of his campaign goes, if the press doesn’t take him seriously he won’t get coverage, and his task of consolidating anti-Romney votes may be impossible.

So Perry’s big task over the next few weeks has been to convince reporters — and any Republican actors who don’t realize it — that he’s Not Dead Yet. Mostly, that means publicity. Thus a wild “flat” tax plan. But we all know that policy isn’t enough to get either Republican voters or the press interested. A good fight helps (and Perry tried to supply that by attacking Romney in the last debate), but freak show stuff trumps, as it were, everything. So a few days of birther questions returned the focus to the Texas governor ... just as he was ready to take advantage of the attention by rolling out his tax plan.

I have no idea whether Perry will end up capturing the nomination or not; it probably depends more on whether Republican party actors and ultimately Republican primary voters are willing to accept Romney than on anything Perry does. If Perry is going to be the main alternative to Romney at the end of the day, which is his obvious objective, he desperately needs publicity. If the cost of that publicity is taking a pounding from liberals over the birther issue — something Republican primary voters won’t care about — that’s well worth it for him.

Yesterday I noted here that national Republicans have opened up a new front in the Massachusetts Senate race by attacking Elizabeth Warren for embracing Occupy Wall Street — the latest effort to turn blue collar whites and independents against the protests and their populist message. Republicans are seeking to tie Warren directly to protesters who clashed with cops in Massachusetts, an effort to exploit a cultural fault line between working class whites and liberal activists that has been key to our politics for decades.

This is the sort of thing that has traditionally spooked Dems, but it appears Warren is standing by the protests. Asked for comment on the GOP criticism, a Warren spokesman sends over this:

Elizabeth was making the point that she has been protesting Wall Street’s practices and policies for years — and working to change them. Wall Street’s tricks brought our economy to the edge of collapse and there hasn’t been any real accountability. She understands why people are so angry and why they are taking their fight to the street. She has said repeatedly everyone has to abide by the law. Elizabeth is working for change a different way, to take this fight to the United States Senate.

That seems to explicitly align her Senate candidacy with the protesters who (justifiably, she says) have taken the fight to the streets. She’s battling the same forces they are — albeit her campaign is qualifying that her Senate candidacy is pursuing change in a “different way.”

Warren was also quizzed by reporters yesterday about the GOP criticism, and she said:

“I have been protesting Wall Street for a very long time. Occupy Wall Street is an organic movement, it expresses enormous frustration and gives a great faith all across the country for people to talk about what’s broken. So I am glad that that conversation is going forward and that it’s going forward in an organic way.”

So there you go. Assuming the argument over Occupy Wall Street will continue in this race, it’s going to be very interesting to see if her support for the movement becomes in any way a political liability. Republicans have had great success in the past with this tactic — recall the hard hats during Vietnam — but Warren doesn’t appear to be fazed by the use of it against her, and if it doesn’t work this time around perhaps we can all agree that it’s not 1970 anymore.

And as Markos Moulitsas adds, why would this tactic work in Massachusetts, of all places? Republicans will argue that the sort of blue collar whites and independents who might be culturally inclined against outsized protests tactics will be central to this race. That may be, but as David Dayen aptly put it: “The hard hats have been brutalized just as much as the rest of us in this economy.”

Relatedly, the current campaign against Warren over Occupy Wall Street is coming out of the offices of national Republicans. Now that the protests are at the center of the Massachusetts race, has anyone asked Scott Brown for comment on them?

Let’s just go through some of the high points of Paul Ryan’s big speech today, which is called: “Saving the American Idea: Rejecting Fear, Envy and the Politics of Division.” Here’s the transcript as prepared for delivery.

To my great disappointment, it appears that the politics of division are making a big comeback. Many Americans share my disappointment...

I don’t know what Ryan means by “many,” but majorities of Americans completely reject this interpretation of what Obama and Dems are doing. A recent Fox News poll asked, leadingly, whether people think Obama’s “political strategy for reelection is designed to bring people together with a hopeful message” or to “drive people apart with a partisan message.” Fifty six percent chose the former; only 32 percent — Ryan’s “many” — chose the latter.

More Ryan:

Just last week, the President told a crowd in North Carolina that Republicans are in favor of, quote, “dirtier air, dirtier water, and less people with health insurance.” Can you think of a pettier way to describe sincere disagreements between the two parties on regulation and health care?

Yes, I can: The entire premise of this very speech. The accusation that Obama and Dems are sowing “envy” and ”class warfare” because they’re taking modest steps to slow trends that have severely exacerbated inequality for decades is as petty and small minded as it gets. Politics is a tough business, and it’s supposed to be all about an aggressive clash of visions. Deal with it.

More Ryan:

The President still has not put forward a credible plan to tackle the threat of ever-rising spending and debt, and it’s been over 900 days since his party passed a budget in the Senate.

The use of the term “credible” makes this into a matter of opinion, not fact. But that aside, has Ryan forgotten that Obama signed legislation — that passed the GOP-controlled House — creating a deficit supercommittee tasked with reaching very specific deficit-cutting goals?

More Ryan:

He is going from town to town, impugning the motives of Republicans, setting up straw men and scapegoats, and engaging in intellectually lazy arguments, as he tries to build support for punitive tax hikes on job creators.

Those “punitive tax hikes on jobs creators” would impact 1/500 of American taxpayers, and the surtaxes on millionaires to pay for individual provisions of Obama’s jobs bill would amount to a tiny percentage of the income of the wealthy, according to the Citizens for Tax Justice. (Ryan seems to be lumping these tax hikes in with some others to reach his conclusion, but the current policy debate is focused on the millionaire surtaxes.) A look at how Obama’s tax policies would actually impact the after-tax income of the rich renders the notion that they’re “punitive” laughable.

Is Obama “impugning the motives of Republicans”? Well, yes he is, and as I’ve argued, the motives of public officials are often tangled and it’s difficult to reach hard conclusions about them. But Mitch McConnell is on record saying his number one priority is to ensure that Obama is a one-term president, and he has acknowledged that Republicans deliberately adopted a political strategy of denying Obama bipartisan support for his proposals.

More Ryan:

Obama quotes Reagan as saying that bus drivers shouldn’t pay a higher effective tax rate than millionaires. Well, that’s a no-brainer. Nobody disagrees with that.

Wait, so does this mean one hundred percent of Republicans agree with the “Buffett Rule”? Now there’s some news!

More Ryan:

Telling Americans they are stuck in their current station in life, that they are victims of circumstances beyond their control, and that government’s role is to help them cope with it — well, that’s not who we are. That’s not what we do.

Coming in the same speech where Ryan accused Dems of erecting “straw men,” this is almost comically cynical. More broadly, it’s a completely distorted version of the liberal argument, a ruse frequently employed by conservatives that’s designed to misrepresent liberalism as anti-individualist, when it’s nothing of the sort.

Indeed, in his climax, Ryan accuses Dems of “moving away” from a belief in “equality of opportunity,” and “towards an insistence on equality of outcome,” adding that Dems are guilty of “a false morality that confuses fairness with redistribution, and promotes class envy instead of social mobility.” This is not the liberal Democratic vision at all. Most liberal Democrats explicitly reject the false choice Ryan has offered here. Whether you agree with them or not, most liberal Democrats believe that government should do what it can to preserve or enhance individual opportunity and mobility, while simultaneously believing that goverment and the safety net should be paid for by tax system that’s more progressive than the one we currently have. We can argue over whether these things are desirable or attainable, but Ryan is simply misleading people about what liberals believe.

In sum, Ryan’s entire speech rests on a premise that’s completely false. But he’s Very Serious!

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UPDATE: Zaid Jilani has lots more on the fundamental truths about wealth inequality that Ryan refuses to acknowledge.

* America: A nation of populists and class warriors: So here’s where we are. In the new New York Times poll, trust in government is in the single digits. Disapproval of Obama’s performance on the economy is soaring. A majority thinks the economy is staying the same or getting worse. A small minority thinks its getting better.

Yet at the same time, solid majorities favor the actual policies Obama has advanced to fix the problem — ones that Republicans have blocked. A plurality of Americans agrees with Occupy Wall Street’s diagnosis of what’s wrong. Despite a relentless effort from the right to portray the movement as radical and extreme, a plurality say it reflects the views of mainstream America.

In the poll, only 38 percent say Obama has a clear plan for creating jobs. But when Americans are asked about his actual policies, without any mention of his name, 51 percent favor payroll tax cuts for workers; 53 percent favor federal aid to states to avert public employee layoffs; 80 percent support spending on the nation’s infrastructure; and 65 percent say taxes on those over $1 million should be increased — all policies Republicans have blocked.

Yes, 50 percent favor reducing regulations, but only 27 percent back lowering taxes for corporations — and 69 percent say GOP policies favor the rich. The big picture here is that Obama’s vision for the economy has solid to overwhelming support — at least when his name isn’t attached to it. But he may not get credit for having a mere vision, and his approval may well continue to tank, even if he’s not to blame for the failure to get his popular policy prescriptions passed. Again: The GOP benefits politically from blocking policies the public supports.

Americans also seem to be tentatively embracing Occupy Wall Street and its basic critique. Though this could change, right now a plurality of 43 percent generally agree with the movement, versus only 27 percent who disagree. And 46 percent say the views of people involved in Occupy Wall Street generally reflect the views of most Americans, versus only 34 percent who say they don’t. Finally: Sixty six percent of Americans think income and wealth distribution in this country should be more even. A nation of class warriors!

Taken together, all these numbers suggest a broader challenge for Obama. Can he leverage the resurgence of economic populism — and the public’s agreement with Democratic ideas — to break an overall political dynamic that ultimately does favor the GOP? One thing is clear: You can’t overstate how volatile and in flux public opinion is right now — and how unpredictable the consequences of this will be.

* Could Occupy Wall Street help Democrats? Relatedly, don’t miss this look at the numbers from Aaron Blake and Chris Cillizza, who conclude (with appropriate caveats) that the seeming mainstreaming of Occupy Wall Street could lend energy and support to the Dem narrative in 2012.

* Breaking: News org compares the Obama and GOP jobs plans: The Los Angeles Times’ Michael Hiltzik does what must not be done in polite company: He compares the two plans to see if they actually — get this — create jobs! His conclusion: The Senate GOP jobs plan is “all smoke” and will do little more than protect corporate profits.

What’s striking is how rare this kind of analysis is, given that so many news orgs widely and credulously blared the news that the Senate GOP had offered a “jobs plan.”

* Challenging the Obama “tsunami of regulations” myth: Via Taegan Goddard, Bloomberg does the honors:

President Barack Obama’s “tsunami” of new government regulations looks more like a summer swell.

Obama’s White House has approved fewer regulations than his predecessor George W. Bush at this same point in their tenures, and the estimated costs of those rules haven’t reached the annual peak set in fiscal 1992 under Bush’s father, according to government data reviewed by Bloomberg News.

* Obama reelect reality check of the day: William Galston on how the Obama team’s hopes for turning the election into a choice between two candidates, rather a referendum on his performance, may prove to be a pipe dream. Galston says it all turns on whether GOP primary voters pick the electable Republican:

Unless the economic environment changes a lot during the next twelve months, skepticism about Obama’s performance as president should be enough to propel Romney to victory, if not one of landslide proportions.

* Romney adviser vouches for Obama mortgage plan: Nice catch by Pat Garofalo: A senior Romney adviser, Glenn Hubbard, is now essentially vouching for Obama’s new home mortgage plan. Romney, you may recall, thinks the foreclosure market should bottom out, but he does think the idea of helping homeowners is worth considering.

Garofalo asks: “will he follow Hubbard into supporting Obama’s plan?”

* Romney’s Ohio screw-up is getting worse: Steve Benen pinpoints why Romney’s waffling on the Ohio labor fight will definitely “leave a mark”:

After all, what’s the knock on the former governor? He’s an unprincipled flip-flopper, who cares about polls than convictions, and will say literally anything to advance his political ambitions. And in one swing through Ohio, Romney confirmed that his critics are right.

* Paul Ryan to amplify right’s failing “class warfare” message: In a speech, Ryan is set to accuse Obama of “sowing social unrest” and of “pitting one group against another.” Luckily, the American people completely reject this interpretation of what Obama is doing.

* Students have a legitimate grievance: Kevin Carey has an interesting look at why students protesting predatory loans and the failures of the education system have a valid point.

* What Occupy Wall Street is really about: I mentioned this yesterday in passing, but this Congressional Budget Office report detailing the explosion in inequality is worth dwelling on in detail. From 1979-2007, that top one percent saw its average after-tax income soar by 275 percent; the middle 60 percent saw income jump by under 40 percent; and the bottom 20 percent only rose 18 percent.

My handy Plum Line calculator indicates to me that this means inequality got far, far worse over that time period. And of course, even the most modest efforts to slow this trend are derided by the likes of Ryan as “class warfare.”

* And one victory that Occupy Wall Street has already achieved: Whatever ends up happening to the protests, it’s now undeniable that it has had one success: It has broken the Beltway Deficit Feedback Loop and shifted the media conversation to one about the economy and jobs. And that’s not a small thing.

What else is happening?

* Rachel Weiner has a reader friendly guide to everything you need to know about the Ohio union fight.

* As Mitt Romney continues to take a beating from conservatives for waffling on Ohio, Rick Perry twists the knife, claiming he, at least, is willing to stand with Governor John Kasich because he’s a “true conservative.”

* Jed Lewison notes that Romney previously supported the Ohio union-busting initiative he can’t quite bring himself to back as the battle hits crunch time, and adds that his mishandling of the mess demonstrates yet again that Romney has no ideological core.

* Nice piece from Joe Conason on how Romney’s stint at Bain, and what the one percent have wrought, add up to a largely unexplored vulnerability that will ultimately be central to the campaign.

* The DNC opens up a new front on Romney: An attack designed to convert his call to let the foreclosure market “hit the bottom” into another iconic moment of indifference towards the middle class.

* Breaking: A GOP candidate calls on Rick Perry, clearly and unequivocally, to stop his birther flirtation. Jon Huntsman:

Barack Obama was born in America. Period. Let’s stop this and focus instead on how we fix the economy that he bungled.

Was that so hard?

* Steve Benen rounds up all the latest examples of Romney’s courageous willingness to speak truth to the GOP base. (Not.)

* Dave Weigel patiently explains to Republicans how easy it is to affirm that, yes, Obama was in fact born in the United States.

* A smart Aaron Blake piece on why the Obama-as-Truman analogy is imperfect but still quite instructive.

* Chart of the day, courtesy of Brian Beutler: The explosion of wealth enjoyed by that top 1 percent is really something to behold.

* National money flows into Massachusetts as the League of Conservation Voters airs new ads hitting Scott Brown’s coziness with Big Oil, another sign of national liberal investment in Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy.

* The next moves in Obama’s offensive on jobs and the economy: The use of executive authority to ease loans for over a million students, and a new initiative to get veterans back to work.

Expect a drumbeat of these — one designed to demonstrate action against the backdrop of GOP obstructionism.

* And Will Oremus asks a tough question: Could the drum circles derail all of Occupy Wall Street?

Today, Mitt Romney refused to take a position on the big battle in Ohio over the ballot initiative to repeal Governor John Kasich’s law rolling back the collective bargaining rights of public employees. The fight is a hugely important one to conservatives, with right wing money flowing into the state, and conservative bloggers erupted in fury at Romney, asking how it is that he can be running for president when he isn’t willing to take a firm stand against the scourge of public employees.

In response to the outcry, Romney’s campaign rolled out a creative argument: His reluctance is about preserving states rights. “Gov. Romney believes that the citizens of states should be able to make decisions about important matters of policy that affect their states on their own,” Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul explained.

Now Romney’s reluctance on the issue has drawn a harsh response from a powerful conservative player: The Club for Growth. A spokesman for the group, Barney Keller, pointed out that Romney did in fact support right to work legislation in New Hampshire last year, despite his current stance on Ohio, and offered this scathing response:

“The big problem many conservatives have with Mitt Romney is that he’s taken both sides of nearly every issue important to us. He’s against a flat tax, now he’s for it. He says he’s against ObamaCare, but was for the individual mandate and susbidies that are central to ObamaCare. He thinks that collective bargaining issues should be left for states to decide if he’s Ohio, but he took the opposite position when he was in New Hampshire. This is just another statement in a long line of statements that will raise more doubts about what kind of President Mitt Romney would be in the minds of many Republican primary voters.”

Brutal. You can’t overstate how important this Ohio battle is to the national right — they see it as a key front in their ongoing effort to break the backs of unions in the middle of the industrial heartland. While one of the outstanding questions about Romney is whether social conservatives will be able to bring themselves to support him, given his previous apostasy on their issues, here’s an example of Romney’s economic conservatism being called into question.

Governors who are willing to risk serious unpopularity in order to roll back the bargaining rights of public employees — like John Kasich and Scott Walker — have become full fledged national conservative heroes. The sense that Romney is unwilling to fully embrace this crusade in a crucial swing state — on the same day that polling shows that labor may defeat conservatives on this one — will seriously deepen already serious doubts on the right about Romney’s conservative mettle.

********************************

UPDATE: It’s worth adding that today’s Quinnipiac poll found that a majority of independents supports rolling back the Ohio collective bargaining law. So conservatives could reasonably wonder if Romney is unwilling to fully embrace this crusade — one that’s extremely important to them in ideological terms — in order to give him a better shot at winning the state as a general election candidate.

As you know, Rick Perry doubled down on his birther flirtation this morning, claiming in an interview that Obama’s birthplace is “a good issue to keep alive.”

“It’s fun to poke him a little bit and say `Hey, let’s see your grades and your birth certificate,’” Perry added.

I thought it would be worth asking the campaigns of the two frontrunners — Herman Cain and Mitt Romney — for comment on this. Are they willing to condemn it? After all, Romney has vouched for Obama’s U.S. citizenship in the past and has made Perry’s unelectability central to his campaign, and it seems likely that Perry’s flirtation with birtherism will fuel doubts about whether he has the gravity and temperament to be a good general election candidate.

No luck.

Both campaigns declined to address Perry’s comments. “We’ll pass,” Cain spokesman J.D. Gordon emailed. A Romney campaign spokesperson also declined comment.

This comes as some Republicans are raising questions about Perry’s birther flirtation. Jennifer Rubin reports that two GOP governors — Terry Branstad of the all important state of Iowa, and Bob McDonnell of Virginia — are now condemning the comments. As Rubin put it: “the message is unmistakable: Knock it off. You’re hurting the party.”

Karl Rove also condemned Perry’s dalliance with birtherism, which he called “nutty.” Rove said: “It starts to marginalize you in the minds of some of the people whom you need in order to get the election”.

But — for now — the two leading GOP presidential campaigns are not willing to go here. Could it be that they worry that condemning Perry’s remarks risks alienating conservative GOP primary voters? Cain, for one, has said the burden is on Obama to prove he was born in the United States. Romney, however, has stated flatly that he thinks Obama’s “citizenship test has been passed.”

In many ways the birther issue is a proxy for generalized Obama hatred: Donald Trump enjoyed short-lived popularity with GOP voters in part because his birther circus act demonstrated a general willingness to attack Obama in as visceral a way possible. Perry seems to be calculating that he can benefit in this way, too. If and when Romney is asked to respond to Perry’s latest, it’ll be interesting to see if he’s willing to condemn Perry’s birther dalliance, or whether he worries whether doing that will raise doubts about his anti-Obama bona fides.

Wow, this is going to be good: Occupy Wall Street is now officially an issue in what may be the highest-profile and most polarizing Senate race in the country.

National Republicans are now attacking Elizabeth Warren for embracing the protests, seeking to make a liability out of the fact that Warren, a longtime critic of Wall Street excess, has now aligned herself with the movement’s intellectual underpinnings. What this means: The conservative effort to turn blue collar whites and independents against the protesters and their broader populist message — exploiting a traditional cultural fault line in our politics — will now unfold in the context of a high profile political campaign.

Warren was asked by the Daily Beast for a comment on the protests. She said: “I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do. I support what they do.”

Now the NRSC has opened fire on Warren for the comments, blasting out an email containing links to stories about protesters in Massachusetts battling with cops. Said NRSC spokesman Brian Walsh: “Warren’s decision to not only embrace, but take credit for this movement is notable considering the Boston Police Department was recently forced to arrest at least 141 of her Occupy acolytes in Boston the other day after they threatened to tie up traffic downtown and refused to abide by their protest permit limits.”

The NRSC is also circulating that Doug Schoen Op ed painting protesters as wild-eyed extremists and arguing that Dems who embrace the protests risk driving away independents and moderates, even though it was subsequently proven that Schoen’s conclusions were not supported by his own data.

In other words, national Republicans are placing their bet. They are wagering that the cultural instincts of the working class whites and independents who will decide this race ensure that the excesses of the protesters will make them less inclined to listen to her populist economic message, which is also directed at those voters. This is an old story in American politics, of course. Conservatives have for decades been mining the tension between blue collar whites and liberal middle class activists who resort to outsized protest tactics and occasional violence. That’s why you hear conservatives constantly referring hopefully to today’s protesters as “McGovernites.”

Warren, by contrast, is making the opposite bet. By unabashedly embracing the protests, she is placing a wager on the true mood of the country right now. She’s gambling that these voters will look past the theatrics of these protests; that they will see that she and the protesters are the ones who actually have their economic interests at heart; and that they will ultimately side with Warren’s and Occupy Wall Street’s general critique of the current system and explanation for what’s gone wrong in this country.

The early polling returns suggest that there’s no evidence that ordinary working-class and middle-class voters are being alienated by the protests. It still remains to be seen where public opinion will end up on the movement and whether there’s really any hope of tying it to a broader working class constituency.

This race was already shaping up as a referendum on whether unabashed left wing populism can win back these voters — and on whether left wing populism in general is seeing a genuine and durable resurgence. If Occupy Wall Street becomes a major flashpoint in the race, the argument will get a whole lot more combustible.