Greg Sargent touches on a point I’ve been meaning to make; he does it in the context of third-party fantasies, but it’s true more broadly of calls for “centrism”. Namely, the hypothetical position self-proclaimed centrists want somebody to take — Michael Bloomberg, a chastened Obama, whatever — is almost always the position actually held by the Democratic party. But to seem “balanced”, the pundits involved have to ignore that inconvenient fact.
Greg puts it this way:
One of the two parties already occupies the approximate ideological space that these commentators themselves are describing as the dream middle ground that allegedly can only be staked out by a third party.
That party is known as the “Democratic Party,” and it alreadly holds many of the positions these commentators want a third party to espouse.
Well, it’s not just the third party thing. I was struck by this passage in Tom Friedman’s last column:
We know what to do — a Grand Bargain: short-term stimulus to ease us through this deleveraging process, debt restructuring in the housing market and long-term budget-cutting to put our fiscal house in order. None of this is easy and the economy will not be fixed overnight; it will take years. But there is every chance it will get healed if our two parties construct the Grand Bargain we need.
Who is the “we” who knows this? Well, me; Christy Romer; President Obama. The GOP, on the other hand, is fiercely opposed to any form of stimulus — it insists that we need to slash spending right now, that anti-stimulus is the way to create jobs. And anger over the prospect of helping delinquent debtors was, you might recall, where the Tea Party got started.
That is, what Tom describes as the centrist position both parties know they should adopt, but refuse to do because of partisanship on both sides, is in fact the actually existing position of the Democratic party — a position that Republicans denounce as “socialist.”
I know that admitting that Barack Obama is already the candidate of centrists’ dreams would be awkward, would make it hard to adopt the stance that both sides are equally at fault. But that is the truth.