In addition to depriving the Democratic Party its House majority, this political season has cost us the services of three of the country’s most prominent “centrists” — Evan Bayh, the Indiana Democrat who grew so tired of the Senate that he declined to run for re-election; Charlie Crist, the Florida governor and Senate hopeful who left the G.O.P. to run, and lose, as an independent against Marco Rubio; and Arlen Specter, who was defeated in Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary after he switched parties to avoid a primary challenge. I’ve written critically about each of these figures before (Specter here, Crist here and here, Bayh here), but I think it’s worth pausing a moment, amid all the midterm analysis, to emphasize what they represented and why they won’t be missed.
We hear a lot about the perils of political polarization, and for understandable reasons: America faces structural challenges that probably can’t be addressed by one party alone, and the waning of bipartisanship is one of the many forces that make a Greece or California-like endgame seem depressingly plausible. But if a polarized political system produces fewer centrists overall, it also increases the power and potential leverage of the centrists who remain. For a time, the most important figures in the debate over health care reform were Chuck Grassley and Max Baucus; later on, that role passed to Ben Nelson, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, among others. (The same was true in the stimulus debate, the financial reform debate, etc.) A swing vote in the U.S. Senate should be able to wield disproportionate influence over the design of legislation; a swing bloc, if one existed, would essentially have veto power over whatever the majority wanted to do. And so the legislator who wastes this power — by engaging in horse-trading without any larger vision, by griping constantly about their own party’s mistakes while voting the party line on every major piece of legislation, or by simply being a self-interested, unprincipled cynic — is as much to blame for the dysfunctions of the American political system as any uncompromising partisan of the left and right.
Specter was a horse-trader and a cynic: He understood the art of the deal and the art of political survival, but his idea of policymaking (visible most recently in the stimulus bill) was to slice a few dollars off whatever the party in power wanted and call it a victory for bipartisanship. Bayh was a griper: As Dave Weigel noted last week, he made it his business to chide Democrats for overreaching on bills that he himself had voted for, while never articulating a detailed vision of what the party or the government should be doing instead. And Charlie Crist’s cynicism was so extraordinary (he campaigned as a Reagan Republican and a liberal Democrat, all in the same year) that he made Specter look like Cato the Younger by comparison. All three were frequently praised for their moderation by credulous reporters, and their political difficulties were constantly cited as evidence that the American political system had gone haywire. But none of the three deserved their favorable ink, because none of them used their position as moderates constructively. Instead, they enter retirement as the most prominent exhibits in the case that the nation’s centrists need to share the blame, where our current difficulties are concerned, with the ideologues on either side.