A Lean And Centrist Look

Patrick Doherty

April 25, 2005

Ron Brownstein's LA Times article may have just outed a movement among centrist Democrats to break free of the party and join their centrist brethren on the other side of the aisle. Says Joe Trippi, "We are now moving toward a very dangerous place for both parties," he says. "It is becoming much more possible for an independent or third party to emerge because they are leaving so much space in the middle. Such a political insurgency would be facilitated by the revolutionary mobilizing capacity of the Internet, a subject on which Trippi, Howard Dean's maverick campaign manager, is clearly expert.

It's doomed to failure. To the extent that centrism is coincident with a pollster-led pandering to America's fiscally conservative, socially liberal, and security-nervous middle class while placating major corporate donors, a third-party run will have as much success as it did in 2002 and 2004.

The reason is simple. It's time to lead America toward a new direction, and Americans know it. Centrists, like John Kerry, offered no big idea, no New Deal to create sustainable economic growth, and merely accepted Bush's cynical strategic assessment that placed terrorism at the top of our fear list. Focus group-tested messages cannot excite the masses when they obviously do not address our fundamental problems.

So far, centrists are showing no signs of any greater degree of strategic insight or political courage. They're offering merely a tax tweak here, an energy susbsidy there and a whole lot of tough but shortsighted stances on terrorism. Their wild shifting of of position on Social Security showed how quickly centrists will abandon their own principles in the face of political resistance. Internet mobilization won't help them overcome these weaknesses.

Centrists would be far better served by seeking a center-left coalition that can win Rockefeller Republicans and Reagan Democrats as well the liberal base of the Democratic Party. Such a program would look past the centrist pandering and outdated Great Society orthodoxies and build a consensus around a new engine of sustainable growth. Along the way, it would deal with energy insecurity, fiscal imbalance, climate change and ecosystem depletion.

But that requires centrists be guided by principle, economics and ecology—and not by polls. Can they do it?