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A Centrist Agenda
In anticipation of the Centrist meeting in Oklahoma this weekend Mort Kondracke offers up an agenda in Moderate Graybeards Need a Top 10 Agenda. Here’s One
This is a domestic policy list. The graybeards might also want to recommend a new American foreign policy that would include a bigger active-duty military trained for “nation building” and counter-insurgency, much-improved intelligence and expanded foreign aid and free trade, plus forceful — but sometimes coercive — diplomacy.
Besides a policy agenda, the most useful immediate product from Oklahoma would be a joint declaration of “Enough, Already!” about the excessive polarization of American politics — the poison that makes it impossible for Republicans and Democrats to agree on fixes for any of America’s big problems.
It’ll be unfortunate if no one runs for president on a platform of centrist, grand-bargain solutions to America’s problems. If so, the graybeards need to speak loudly, form alliances and rally a public that is fed up with polarized gridlock.
It seems to me that at the top of the wish list should be reforms to increase the likelihood that moderate, pragmatic, collaborative centrists can get elected through reform of campaign finance and redistricting. It would be inspiring to see the Graybeards hook up with the DLC, RLC and the Bipartisan Policy Center to promote this kind of Centrist agenda.
3 Responses to “A Centrist Agenda”
They’re not true centrists. They’re RINOs (often liberal) and Dems who don’t question the status quo. They’re trying to maintain the nice, safe, overbloated elitist Washington, DC status quo. They’re simply less liberal than other politicians in the Democratic Party (who are impatient with “spineless” Dem leadership) or their more radical relatives.
This is similar to one or two groups in Congress that formed (one of them by oft-RINO Arlen Specter) in reaction to the 1994 elections. How dare the US public question the Gospel of Big Government, and worse, elect people who may seek real reform!
Left-to-right scale of 1-10, they’re a nice, safe 4.
Bloomberg is no centrist. He’s liberal, simply placed in the same place in the spectrum as the meeting participants, less to the left of other, more liberal Dems and radicals.
For every or any five, there are two or more threes.
And no personal expenditure tax! (If you thought the income tax we have now is bad enough…) A VAT or even a retail sales tax is much better.