Claiming The Middle
by James Hall, Senior Associate Editor
February 18, 2009
"Leaning Left"
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Sadly, one of my favorite writers, John Updike, died this past week. Updike
was famous for the portrayal of middle America and middle Americans in his novels.
"My subject is the American Protestant small-town middle class," he
told an interviewer with Life Magazine in 1966. "I like middles.
It is in middles that extremes class, where ambiguity restlessly rules."
Updike wasn't talking about politics then, but he could have been. Ideological tastes for conservative and liberal only cover 30-35% of the electorate on either side of the political spectrum. While this percentage will and does elect ideologues for congressional districts, especially today's gerrymandered districts, presidential races and state-wide elections for offices like US Senator and Governor must be fought for in the middle as well, the place where "extremes clash."
Governing the country also requires the middle.
It didn't take long for this to become apparent to the new Obama administration. It came in looking for a broad bipartisanship support for its economic proposals, but ran into ideological buzz-saws from both sides of the aisle. Liberals in Congress largely ignored the Obama team's ideas for stimulus and investment to put in place their own pet projects for funding, ones long-spurned by a Senate with the power of a Republican filibuster and a president with veto power over their legislation.
On the right, Congress (especially the House) has coalesced around opposition to the stimulus package. Suddenly, (after eight years of earmark extravagance) they reinvented the idea of fiscal discipline in their party. They also glorified their opposition to the new powers of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, while remaining carefully neutral towards our currently-popular president.
Obama has tried to deal with the Washington Republican establishment, but he is wasting his breath with them. They remain united in their opposition, and the bad taste in the public's mouth over the first Bush Bailout lent potency to that opposition. (Never mind that most of this crowd voted for President Bush's vague bailout plan without vocal opposition.)
These past two weeks, President Obama has begun moving in the right direction. He talked to enthusiastic crowds in Indiana and Florida (Republican territory), he invited Republican governors in need of stimulus cash to the White House, and he's building a broad consensus beyond the Beltway that a stimulus needs to done before our unemployment rate hits a catastrophic 10%.
It may be regrettable that most Washington Republicans didn't get onboard for this economic stimulus package, but it isn't necessary that they do, either. What he has to do is to cultivate the middle, the key to all successful politics these days.
Cultivating the middle means ignoring the ideological Washington Republicans, especially those in the House. It means working with a few moderate Senate Republicans to overcome the filibusters that conservative Senate Republicans will use otherwise. It also means refusing to play the ideological games of the Democratic Left, especially the urge to try office holders in the Bush administration for their abuse of government in the past eight years, as tempting as it might be to do so.
Most of all, it means rallying the middle of the country to his side and keeping pressure on Congress to do as the president wants-get the country back on track economically, rebuild infrastructure, revamp healthcare, pursue the (real) War on Terror in Afghanistan, reach out to the rest of the world to deal with issues like nuclear proliferation, and help create a Two-State solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Continue to be pragmatic, Mr. President, move forward and don't look back.
That's the middle ground. ***
© 2009 James Hall
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© 2009 BY THE AMERICAN PARTISAN.
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