Should there be a Center Party in American politics?
Are elements of the Republican Party and the
Democratic Party tilting so far right and left that
the center -- which is clearly a large plurality of the
American electorate -- rarely gets its proper representation
in our political system? The short answers are: no
and yes.
No, we don't need a new third party -- that never works
in our system. Ross Perot and Ralph Nader merely distorted
the elections they ran in. But, yes, we need to find a way
to offset the exaggerated polarization of our big parties
and give the center its due. The way for Democrats to do
that is not by mimicking the Republican hard-right strategy
of driving their party toward its natural extreme.
Rather, it is by seeing problems through a non-ideological
lens and seeking commonsense solutions that can appeal
to a broad swath of voters.
This was the message of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.),
writing recently on the liberal blog Daily Kos. Obama
noted that if Democrats are to once again gain control of
things like Supreme Court appointments, they must win
elections -- but they cannot do it with a strident advocacy-group
tone that "is an impediment to creating a workable
progressive majority." A lurch to the left, he wrote, "misreads
the American people."
Clearly, the place to build the center is in the
Democratic Party. It is the party of diversity, economic
hope, the middle class, and the aspiring middle class.
While it no longer enjoys a natural majority in the electorate,
the party can, if it makes the right choices, be the
home of a set of ideas that builds majorities in election
after election. We've done this before. President Bill
Clinton attracted enough center-right voters to offset the
Republican advantage that has emerged in recent decades
because he promoted ideas that had broad appeal to the
middle -- economic revival, fiscal discipline, poverty
reduction through welfare reform, crime prevention
through more police on the street.
One of the problems with today's politics in the
Democratic Party is that it consists of one thing -- a majority
of moderates -- but appears to be something else. Ask
the world what's a Democrat and you might get Michael
Moore for an answer.
Yet the Democratic Party is overwhelmingly a
moderate party. Though John Kerry received a
whopping 85 percent of the liberal vote in the
last election, that is still only 21.4 million
votes. He won just 54 percent of the moderates,
but that's 29.7 million votes. There were, in
short, 8 million more moderate voters than
liberal voters in the Democratic Party on that
day.
The challenge lies in squeezing
out a few million more votes from
the moderate cohort, so that the
Republican opponent wins only,
say, 40 percent, not 46 percent, of the moderate vote.
Once again, we know this can be done: Bill Clinton won
60 percent of the moderates in 1992 and 63 percent in
1996. But one way not to do it is to take extreme positions
on hot-button social issues, or to duck the paramount
importance of national security in favor of domestic social
issues. That will just drive up the Republican share of the
moderate vote.
Part of the challenge, of course, is reconciling the
party's liberal and centrist wings. Obama has warned
against a Democratic Party narrative that "demand[s]
fealty to the one, 'true' progressive vision of the country."
That, he said, will "risk the very thoughtfulness and
openness to new ideas that are required to move this
country forward." He upbraided purists who "lash out at
those who share our fundamental values because they
have not met the criteria of every single item on our progressive
'checklist'." Instead of such infighting, he argued,
liberals and centrists must see themselves as allies in a
common enterprise.
The moment for turning the Democratic Party into
the Center Party may be near. The Republican Party is
not merely running through a bad patch right now; its
multiyear trends are toward ideological intensification
and polarization -- an increasingly right-wing party. Their
red is, in every study of voting trends, getting redder.
Voters in the middle who've danced with the elephant in
the last few elections may be increasingly turned off not
only by today's scandals and mismanagement, but by the
definition of a party given increasingly to its own political
correctness on the right.
The surest way for Democrats to mess up this opening
is to copy the Republicans with promotion of an ironclad
orthodoxy that works among the party's extremes, but has
no appeal to wavering moderates. Democrats shouldn't
get bluer, they should get smarter.
