“The centre cannot hold” — W.B. Yeats
Someone needs to tell that to David Broder, whose pining today for a political realignment that creates a new centrist party that would include Joe Lieberman, Michael Bloomberg, John McCain and Mike DeWine, was somewhat unseemly. It is an odd mix of so-called independents who are independent only in their willingness to occasionally buck their parties.
Independence in a political sense, though, has to run deeper than that. Independent thought requires more than a tilting against Washington, but a willingness to go against the generally accepted wisdom. Broder, for instance, touts DeWine at the expense of Sherrod Brown, a Congressman highly critical of neoliberal economics — i.e., the current status quo — and Bush’s war. DeWine? Let’s just say he’s taking different positions than Brown.
Broder is not touting mavericks so much as he is bemoaning the disappearance of a moderate center probably best represented by Rhode Island’s Lincoln Chafee and Vermont’s Jim Jeffords.
In reality, the centrists he bows to — McCain, Lindsey Graham and John Warner — are nothing more than hard-conservatives who disagree with the president on narrow issues. Lieberman is a mixed-bad Democrat — liberal on some economic issues and abortion, conservative on the war and some other social issues (Hollywood and television, the Clinton impeachment).
I would love to see a third party form, but not on Broder’s grounds. What we don’t need is another corporate-friendly party whose sole objective would be to defend the status quo.
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Hank Kalet 