There is no lack of interesting people in the political center. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg -- one of the few popular incumbents in the country -- has not only declared himself a centrist but has also launched a campaign of support for other centrists. He flies around the country endorsing both Democrats and Republicans who he thinks show the ability to compromise and have the courage to depart from party orthodoxy on issues such as gun control (he is in favor) or more stringent financial regulation (he is against). He nearly lost me when he inexplicably endorsed Harry Reid, but never mind.
Others are trying, usually behind the scenes, to find solutions to problems that divide liberals and conservatives bitterly. Recently, Steve Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute (conservative) got together with Mark Muro of the Brookings Institution (liberalish) and two scholars from the Breakthrough Institute (further left) to talk about America's stalled energy policy. Their starting point: For two decades, the right has called climate change a figment of the United Nations' imagination and pretended that "drill, baby, drill" is a policy. For the same two decades, the left has been talking about the end of the world and pretending that wind and solar can replace oil and gas without massive subsidy. The result: gridlock, a lot of wasted money and an ever-growing American dependence on imported oil.
Working together, they came up with a report called "Post-Partisan Power" (read the whole thing at http:// www.aei.org or http:/ / thebreakthrough.org), which calls for the removal of wasteful subsidies and advocates investments designed to make "new clean energy sources" commercially viable. Just as important, though, is the point this group made by working together. In their introduction, they note that bipartisanship has helped create economic growth. And not only the distant past: Welfare reform was passed thanks to both Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich.
Bipartisanship is, of course, the source of plenty of disastrous ideas itself. Sometimes it produces worst-of-all-possible-worlds types of legislation, like those energy bills that subsidize gas, oil, wind, nuclear, coal, biofuels, hydrogen and anything else that might keep a swing state happy. Sometimes it produces agreements that are so centrist that one or the other party eventually rejects them. That's what happened to the McCain-Kennedy immigration reform, a bill I'm sure John McCain wishes he'd never laid eyes on.
Still, even if bipartisanship doesn't always work, even if "moderate" legislation is often weak, even if centrists sometimes fail completely, it doesn't matter: We are condemned to cross-party compromise. Without it, our system doesn't work: That's what "checks and balances" means. In American politics, if you don't want to cooperate with your political opponents -- if you prefer to scorn them, shun them or call them names -- that means that you don't, in fact, want to get anything done. Moderates often achieve less than they could. But extremists achieve nothing at all.
Which is why this Jon Stewart rally is such a gloomy development. I'm sure his Million Moderate March, if it happens, will be amusing, and I wouldn't want to spoil the fun by calling it "tragic." But if that's the best the center can do, then "blackly humorous" wouldn't be that far off.
Yes, extremists like Obama and the Democrats achieved nothing at all in the last two years. They didn't pass a thing. Nothing. Not a thing. Oh, only if the Centrists would rise up and retake the country from both parties...only centrists can ever get anything done in America!
This "both sides are equally bad" stuff is the real legacy of the last ten years, and you wonder why there's an enthusiasm gap.
She's smoked way too much crack! What the hell does our two-party system have to do with checks and balances? That refers to the THREE branches of government, not a two-party political system. I wouldn't even use her column to clean up cat puke.
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