“Many of us are true moderates and centrists, who simply object much more to liberal than to conservative misdeeds, and who are mischaracterized and laughably mislabeled by the many liberals on the Net, including on this “Moderate” [sic] Web site.”

Considering you “object much more to liberal than to conservative misdeeds”, how does that make you a “true” moderate more than someone like me who objects much more to conservative than to liberal misdeeds? Wouldn't that just make us both the flip-side of the same centrist/moderate coin? Isn't it a bit presumptuous and condescending to declare yourself the “true moderate and centrist”? You label those who don't agree with you as the “radical Left” which is just not the case.

You have a point with independents, or to be more precise, perhaps, the swing voters (who in theory are as likely to vote Dem as they are GOP). These both major parties must fight over. They must both appeal in some way to the relative center (it's more partially liberal than truly centrist) to steal this vote bloc that is up for grabs, while not alienating their wings or “bases.” With the GOP, which includes many pro-big-government “neo-conservatives” (the term is more broad in scope than just the recent pro-war-in-Iraq militant-Wilsonian crowd), it is a question of sellout (relying on GOP-leaning voters to vote GOP as the lesser of two evils no matter how closely the DC GOP approaches the Dems in politics as well as in practices). The middle class is hooked on entitlements, which is one reason the GOP has often moved to the left (to preserve many of those entitlements, in many cases). Meanwhile with the Dems, the party's “base” or left wing is far removed from the rest of the public, so the Dems have problems as we see in particular with Hillary Clinton (who is far to the left in practice as well as in unguarded conversation, as we saw in the 1990s in Washington already). For the DC Dems to move left to appeal to its farther-left wing (as far left as the likes of Kucinich, as a “sensible extreme” example for illustrative purposes), the Dems will lose multiple swing votes, not to mention the rest of us who are moderate but lean conservative if anything and recoil at far-left stuff.

McCain promises pretty much Business As Usual in DC, which is not true alternative to a more ambitious-DC agenda of Clinton or Obama. Compromise can sometimes be nothing but a sellout or surrender.

I don't see prospects for corrections and improvements to this any time soon. For now we just have to stay sane and be on guard and practice damage control. Things will change in DC eventually, but only in a negative manner, fighting over a tighter budget in 20 years or so as entitlement costs skyrocket.