Wiping Out The Center

The latest victim of George Bush and Karl Rove is the political center.

Moderates in both parties are running for cover as voters angry at Bush's hard-right politics, incompetence, and bungling of the Iraq war look for ways to vent their wrath.

Unfortunately, the largest blocs of those angry voters are in blue states, where there are relatively few right wing Republicans to go after. So, instead they are blasting away indiscriminately at Republican and Democratic moderates.

Joe Lieberman in Connecticut is the most obvious example, but there are others. Rep. Christopher Shays in Connecticut and Sen. Lincoln Chafee in Rhode Island are endangered moderates on the GOP side. In fact just about every remaining Republican in the northeast is an endangered species--they're a bit like Democrats in the South over the past 10 years, a steadily declining breed indeed.

Among Republicans, a similar phenomenon may be happening, but it appears to be more isolated. The betting today is that Rep. Joe Schwarz, a Republican moderate in Minnesota, will lose the GOP primary today to a far right winger. Since there aren't that many GOP moderates outside the northeast, however, it's hard to say.

The numerous '08 presidential contenders in both parties are taking notice of the trend. It doesn't bode well. If things keep going this way, the '08 races will be huge loyalty contests among each party's more extreme wings, promising a nasty, polarized race.

The true victim, of course, is us--the country as a whole. In today's polarized environment, nothing is getting done at the national level on a whole host of important problems. We can't get going on energy, where we need some important compromises on domestic oil drilling, conservation, nuclear development and renewable sources. We can't even get a discussion going on social security. We can't tackle illegal immigration, which is a problem. We can't even get started on global warming (of course, it would help if the President would have the balls to acknowledge there is problem). The list goes on.

While states can individually try their best to address these problems, most cannot be satisfactorily resolved in such piecemeal fashion.

We don't see things getting any better over the next two years.

Sigh.