All Things in Moderation …
By Denise Best | Related entries in Blogging, General PoliticsA political observation which should not be lost on either side of the aisle.
Here’s a prediction: The important political battles of the next several years will be over which party commands this high ground of the center — and offers solutions to the problems that worry the country.
Right now neither Republicans nor Democrats can lay coherent claim to being that party of performance. They are both still captives of the old conventional wisdom that the route to victory passes through the base — the true believers on the right and left wings who are the activists in both parties. That logic works until the big majority in the middle finally says: Enough!
Have we reached this point as an electorate, where we’re ready to embrace a more moderate platform that’s solution-oriented, or are we still too engaged in the dynamic of political entrenchment and the resulting blame game?
What will it take to reach this middle ground?
This entry was posted on Friday, November 11th, 2005 and is filed under Blogging, General Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
November 11th, 2005 at 11:33 pm
I seem to have a darker view than Ignatius.
Sometimes when you look at election results it seems like the American people (or the 25 percent who bother to vote) are mostly voting for gridlock.
Maybe it’s that the committed partisans always want to keep enough of the Other Party on hand to serve as a scapegoat. More likely it’s that we really don’t trust either of these entities with complete control of anything.
Being the party that has good ideas, and being the party of performance, are two different things. Just look at the current GOP. It’s practically had a born-again experience as an activist, utopian promoter of world transformation since 9/11. But successes have been painful and too few.
Somehow I always feel like I’m standing on my head when I read these sorts of articles. Like winning political power is the ultimate goal, and doing something competent and widely approved just happens to be the strategy that’s working this week.
Being toward the center, or balanced between the extremes, is no guarantee of broad appeal or stability. Some of the most brutal punch-ups in American politics today are over issues where the public polls in broad agreement. Yet we can’t even agree about what we agree about.