C Stanley,
Republican turnout was actually quite high. But Democratic turnout was incredibly high and all those 10 percent swing voters went to the Democrats for the first time since 1990.

Yes, good point; I guess what I was trying to say is that the difference in turnout between D and R’s was higher than it would have been if the GOP wasn’t disgusted. So that meant that the 10% swinging to D was able to be a decisive factor. You had D’s that were highly motivated and R’s that were unmotivated at best (and in many cases, actually motivated for their own party to lose). So when I said low R turnout, what I meant was low net turnout as compared to the D’s.

C Stanley,
Republican turnout was actually quite high. But Democratic turnout was incredibly high and all those 10 percent swing voters went to the Democrats for the first time since 1990.

You’re right, CS, there’s always that possibility. I think of those types of ideological divisive issues as a national luxury. If we are attacked again, or if we feel under a big enough threat, more people will be willing to throw social issues under the bus, and the appeal of Rudy and Obama might be the beneficiaries. I honestly view both of them as potential candidates for Vice President, and am hoping other candidates in the lower tiers will move up. Obama is wonderful, but inexperienced, Rudy has a definite problem with minority voters, though I think its great that he managed to clean up NYC. Both appear to offer leadership to Americans outside their “base”, which in my mind was where Bush went wrong. He virtually ignored the 2/3 of the country that weren’t on the hard right, and catered too much to big GOP donors and cronies.

But couldn’t it be that moderation is really a way of thinking rather than a brand of affiliation? As I have written elsewhere, I am struck by the way that the two-party system tends to present relatively stark choices between Big Ideas that have been simplified and absolutized, with true believers encouraged to believe that if our team is for A and the other team is for B, then A is all-important and must be maximized, while B is unimportant and should be mentioned as little as possible. (Fill in “liberty” for A and “security” for B and you’ll have an idea of what I mean.) There is an older way of thinking about moral and political principles that looks for the “golden mean” between A and B. I think that type of thinking — not any set of policy positions and not a particular penchant for wishy-washiness — defines moderation.

I’m sorry, but I didn’t read your post very carefully, because I has already read the original article.

How about a ‘willing to compromise’ question insteas?

I don’t know what “need is clearly established” means, afaik it’s not even a euphemism for anything. I think it’s a personal choice except there should be cut off dates (say 20-24 weeks) and I wouldn’t mind some other barriers like parent notification or similar stuff. So I guess I’d answer the “most extreme” on this, but it’s far from the extreme position.

Next question: “Some people think it is important to protect the environment even if it costs some jobs or otherwise reduces our standard of living. Other people think that protecting the environment is not as important as maintaining jobs and our standard of living.”

Then it asks much more/somewhat more/same for environment and standard of living. Well again, I don’t know it depends. Are we talking pollution controls, logging, drilling for oil, opening up federal parks, carbon tax, etc? I’m not even consistent about one aspect — sometimes Endangered Species Act is great, sometimes it’s not. Everything depends on cost/benefit.

The moderates will become as insignificant as the Republicans have become as soon as the Democrats go over the 50% mark.

To me, the question for America is what is going to happen when the very left partisans that control the Democratic Party have the automatic support of more than 50% of the vote and the other half is left out of the process. How tolerate will the social conservatives be if they felt locked out of the political process and what actions will they take if they fell that they are excluded from the political process.

I don’t know what “need is clearly established” means, afaik it’s not even a euphemism for anything. I think it’s a personal choice except there should be cut off dates (say 20-24 weeks) and I wouldn’t mind some other barriers like parent notification or similar stuff. So I guess I’d answer the “most extreme” on this, but it’s far from the extreme position.

Next question: “Some people think it is important to protect the environment even if it costs some jobs or otherwise reduces our standard of living. Other people think that protecting the environment is not as important as maintaining jobs and our standard of living.”

Then it asks much more/somewhat more/same for environment and standard of living. Well again, I don’t know it depends. Are we talking pollution controls, logging, drilling for oil, opening up federal parks, carbon tax, etc? I’m not even consistent about one aspect — sometimes Endangered Species Act is great, sometimes it’s not. Everything depends on cost/benefit.

Then it goes on and starts to ask about very specific policy questions and asks the person how they would vote if they were a representative.

I think this questionaire’s conclusion is a little misguided. Well it is and isn’t. It does a good job of measuring Politics, it doesn’t do a good job of measuring how people think.

I agree the vast majority of people are very ideological (even on this site) when talking about things completely abstractly OR when talking about policy proscriptions that already have ideological tags attached to them. This is why there is no cognitive dissonance for Republicans to criticize Clinton for his nation building while Democrats complained on infringing upon the Presidency and then have it reverse within a couple years. What I disagree about is that people can’t support the same policies (even for different ideological reasons) when there aren’t clear teams. Whenever I bring up something “ahead of the curve” (like stem cells or fuel cells before they were politicized) the reaction from both my “liberal” and “conservative” friends was very similar. So to augment what kim said, the appeal of an Obama or Guiliani (although to a lesser extent I think) is not just “rising above,” but making everyone feel like they’re on the same team so they can focus on little implementational details. This is why Obama has gotten so much praise from Republicans that have worked with him. Of course I fear that the way our system is set up, it might be impossible for him to maintain this or else he won’t get nominated.

I think you have a point about the advantages of being a moderate, but I wouldn’t agree with you that people are just trying to dismiss moderates because we’re jealous. I think there’s an effort to quantify what a lot of us feel; that there really aren’t that many true moderates today. I think that many people self identify as moderates because they may lean one way on one issue and the other way on another issue. That may average out to being a moderate (and I would agree with the part that you stress, it makes you less beholden to a particular party) but it doesn’t mean that you are any more likely to compromise on issues than the partisans are (speaking rhetorically here; I don’t mean that you personally are unwilling to compromise, Tim.)

Kim: I think you have a point about those two candidates, but then again, it’s early days. It may prove during the course of the primaries, that our desire for big picture leadership and centrism is trumped by our desire for purity.

The question to ask is not if one voted democrat or republican, but if one voted for liberal democrats or conservative republicans. The answers to such a question would be far more telling.

I honestly think that there are people solidly in the liberal and conservative camps who are jealous of moderates. When a party does something stupid, we don’t feel beholden to minimize the impact. We’re free to call it stupid. Those on the extremes then try to insult and denigrate us, by calling us “squishy,” saying that we don’t believe in anything, or even trying to prove that we don’t exist. Secretly, though, they wish they had our freedom and cleaness of conscience.

The middle still matters, but frankly I think the only reason they mattered in the last election was because GOP turnout was low (or turnoff was high) because of a lot of factors converging- corruption, fragmentation of different factions of the party, discouragement over Iraq, etc. If the GOP had been doing a good job governing with it’s majority, then the middle may not have been able to offset support of the GOP to create the Democratic victories.

And I have to say that I’m more pessimistic than both you and Paul about the ability of centrists to bring about cooperation. I think that centrists would agree in theory with that, but when it comes time to actually come up with the cooperative solutions to problems, as a group there isn’t a strong enough consensus on which types of compromises are acceptable. An analogy for this situation is the current one with Democrats and Iraq. There’s a broad base of support to “do something” to change the status quo, but there’s not a consensus about what actually should be done. So it seems like there’s a lot of call for pragmatic, bipartisan solutions but each person calling for this has a different idea of how to go about it and none of them are as willing to compromise as they think they are, when it comes down to it.

Hopefully I’m wrong; maybe people really are getting fed up enough with the polarity to realize the need to compromise more, but I’m not so sure we’re there yet (or if it will even be possible on a lot of issues.)