The Center is a moving target

Ross Douthat writes in the Atlantic.com blog about Lieberman Democrats and the challenge of finding, and staying in, the political center

…the American “center” moves around a lot (and varies wildly on an issue-by-issue basis), and thus a party that moves leftward or rightward on the hot-button issues of the day can sometimes find a new center that nobody realized was there. This tends to leave the inhabitants of the old middle – the Rockefeller Republicans in the ’70s and ’80s, and perhaps the Lieberman Democrats of today – flummoxed and out-of-step, unable to figure out that just because they’ve always considered themselves “centrists” doesn’t mean the American people will always agree with them.

Ain’t that the truth. It is harder to create agreement on a centrist position than for any other position on the political spectrum.

Instead of firing arguments into a crowd with your back against the wall one is in the middle firing back in all directions. No wonder Centrists are relatively scarce – they tucker out faster.

But it seems to me that by shifting the geometry a bit we can mark out a relatively stable place form which Centrists can join the fray.

We Centrists tend to embrace positions that are relatively in the center of the political spectrum, and embrace collaborators who are relatively pragmatic and open minded. As a group, we could align behind adjustments to public policy that focus on process such as promoting candidates who are more pragmatic and less beholden to special interests. This might be achieved by reducing the amount of money a candidates needs to raise for a campaign while increasing the amount a candidates needs to work to build consensus among a wider range of constituents.

This is the mind-set of the Founders – how to set up a process to optimize the chances for consensus.