Je Suis Le Centre

Tom Friedman's usually pretty good about recognizing others' points of view, even if he usually dismisses them as wrong without particularly deep analysis. But today's op-ed piece made me laugh. His premise is that innovative structural electoral reform will be required to stop the "race to the extremes" required for moderate candidates and elected officials to survive the two-party primary process. Whether that is the case or not, I think the ideas of non-partisan redistricting and alternative voting have merit, and should be pursued. But I almost couldn't continue reading after this paragraph:

The radical center is “radical” in its desire for a radical departure from politics as usual. It advocates: raising taxes to close our budgetary shortfalls, but doing so with a spirit of equity and social justice; guaranteeing that every American is covered by health insurance, but with market reforms to really bring down costs; legally expanding immigration to attract more job-creators to America’s shores; increasing corporate tax credits for research and lowering corporate taxes if companies will move more manufacturing jobs back onshore; investing more in our public schools, while insisting on rising national education standards and greater accountability for teachers, principals and parents; massively investing in clean energy, including nuclear, while allowing more offshore drilling in the transition. You get the idea.

Well, I get the idea that Tom Friedman thinks Obama's campaign platform was the definition of centrist. This list is so far off from what I would consider the "center" of American public opinion that I almost don't know where to start. It's certainly pretty close to the "center" of moderate Democratic public opinion, with the occasional sop to moderate Republicans, but equating that with the views of moderate Independents is just wishful thinking.

The wishful thinking and willful blindness then reaches its climax here:

Obama won the presidency by tapping the center — centrist Democrats, independents and Republicans who wanted to see nation-building at home “to make their own lives and those of others better,” said Tim Shriver, the C.E.O. of the Special Olympics. They saw in Obama a pragmatist who could pull us together for pragmatic solutions. But hyperpartisanship has frustrated those hopes. (Alas, though, it is not equal. There are still many conservative Blue Dog Democrats, but the liberal Rockefeller Republicans have been wiped out.)

So, just to be clear, the Democrats have moved right, and the Republicans have moved right. And this proves that the center is being underrepresented because of hyperpartisanship. I don't think that word means what he wants it to mean.