America's Race to the Middle

America's Race to the Middle
After Years of Gridlock, Campaign '08 May Yield A New Political Center
By GERALD F. SEIB and JOHN HARWOOD
May 10, 2008; Page A1

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In the wake of Tuesday's primary elections in North Carolina and Indiana, it appears more likely than ever that the two presidential candidates this fall will be Sen. Barack Obama for the Democrats and Sen. John McCain for the Republicans. They happen to be the two most surprisingly successful candidates of the year, and both got ahead largely by arguing they have unique abilities to bring people together in Washington. Change may be stirring in other areas that have contributed to gridlock. Voters are pulling politicians toward the middle of the ideological spectrum by registering as independents and calling for centrist solutions. A new cast of political players -- some young, most little-known to the nation -- is emerging to show that there are ways to transcend gridlock by reaching across the aisle.

And a seismic shift has come in the way politicians chase the money they need to win and keep office. A surge in Internet campaign donations by average citizens carries the promise that politicians might become less beholden to special interests on the right or left. Raising more money via the Internet instead of on the hustings may even leave politicians more time to spend in Washington, talking to each other.. The art and science of modern politics have made the divisions wider. Computer software allows politicians to pinpoint, house by house, the voting tendencies of particular neighbors. Armed with that information, political demographers from both parties have drawn increasingly safe, ideologically homogenous congressional districts when state legislatures back home re-craft those districts after each decade's census. Instead of voters choosing their lawmakers, Republican Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia says, lawmakers are choosing their voters.

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Sens. McCain and Obama explicitly base their appeals to voters on the premise that they can reach out both to independent voters who are affiliated with neither party, and to politicians of the opposite party. A precedent for such a governing style recently has been set: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California and Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York have led the way, each succeeding largely by detaching themselves from their Republican party and governing as independents. Voters are pushing the system in precisely this direction: The share of the public registered as neither Democrat nor Republican, but rather as independent, has exploded in recent years.

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Business and labor organizations, equally frustrated with Washington's problems, also are fueling the drive for new and more bipartisan ways of doing business. In the twilight phase of the Bush term, some have started linking arms to find solutions. Last year, General Electric Co., Duke Power and other corporate titans staged a press conference alongside leading environmentalists to call for action against global warming through a national "cap and trade" system to limit carbon emissions. Similarly, in its record-setting $45 billion leveraged buyout of the TXU Corp. energy concern, private-equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts anticipated and defused environmentalists' opposition in advance. KKR pledged to shut down several high-polluting coal-fired TXU power plants, and in turn the environmentalists agreed not to foment political opposition to the deal.

Progress on Pennsylvania Avenue increasingly is going to come when such coalitions of "the lions and the lambs" -- that is, interest groups seemingly opposed to each other -- come together, says Bernadette Budde, a strategist at the Business-Industry Political Action Committee known as BiPAC... Ultimately, the need to solve some especially daunting problems in the next decade or so may force Washington's rival power centers into united action, much as World War II and the Cold War did in decades past. The two parties' success over previous decades in conquering problems that demanded national consensus -- civil rights, the defeat of the Communist threat, welfare reform -- has pushed the agenda in recent years onto topics where there is less consensus.

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spectrum. We must not fall for the centrist settle BS.

Hopefully this is at least a step in the right direction. I still have problems, however, convincing friends that the political discourse has shifted towards the right in this country. In the media, every time a right winger refers to any liberal they always use the same (extreme left, far left, radical left, etc) mantra. It's annoying that people I know consider their own political views centrist when years ago they'd be thought of as conservative.

Dare we hope that people are waking up to the "working the ref" strategy of the extreme right?

unemployment, the skyrocketing cost of basic commodities and food riots, and coming soon hyperinflation. The sheeple who refuse to see the reality of the situation are either; in shocked disbelief, or their paycheck demands their residence in the state of denial.

especially to the religious wrong.

You have a very strong and vocal group that claims that "god" (their god, of course) speaks to them directly, that "his" words are not to be questioned. Therefore, they will never compromise on anything.

Of course they are hypocrites. If abortion is "murder," they why exempt rape and incest? Why should an "innocent child" be killed for the sins of his father?

I disagree with the claim that the middle is the place to be.

until they stop stolen elections, we will not see the results