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In an article about Obama’s recent meeting with New York mayor Bloomberg, Thomas Ferguson writes the following about a well-funded third party effort:
Last year a group, Americans Elect, surfaced with a plan that strikingly resembled one of the schemes of 2008… . Once again, the media response was enthusiastic: Thomas Friedman of the New York Times and others promoted the concept as just what America needed to break the two party deadlock that they saw hamstringing American politics.
Americans Elect’s very expensive efforts to get on the ballot in all 50 states, though, sported some very traditional features. Though it staked out a rhetorical claim to the political center, it declined to reveal who was financing it. The few moneybags it acknowledged were hardly from the political center. Peter Ackerman, for example, who acknowledges helping to finance the start up, was formerly Director of Capital Markets at Drexel Burnham Lambert, the firm Michael Milken made famous… .
One thing this illustrates to me is the limitations of characterizing interest groups by their political positions. In the current U.S. political climate, a multimillionaire who is on the left fringe of the Republican party, supporting tax cuts and assistance to Wall Street, is indeed in the political center. He might even support gay marriage and legal abortion! On the other hand, I agree with Ferguson that there’s something odd about thinking of someone like that as “centrist,” given that these guys have strong (and expensive) political goals. When they’re not playing the role of centrists, they are a very particular interest group. (And replacing a single left-right scale with a multidimensional issue space does not resolve this problem, that interests are not the same as ideology.)
[Cross-posted at The Monkey Cage]
sue on March 15, 2012 10:01 AM:
the center is just some hypothetical average of conflicting policies at a given moment.
it has no meaning beyond that and is often ridiculous to boot.
if santorum moves the dialogue to the medieval right, does the center move too??do we care?
who decrees what stuff gets averaged out to create this imaginary middle?the media?pollsters?
Rich on March 15, 2012 10:21 AM:
The center has usually tilted all over the place rather than "splitting the difference". Being pro-gay marriage has been slowly drifting to the center. Legislation favoring financial services drifted toward the center and hasn't been pushed back. Health care reform, but not its solution was very centrist. To a large extent, it refelects shifts in public opinion, as well as who has the money and ambition to to influence reps. It also reflects mainstream media position--gun control once was a media sacred cow. Now even Tom Friedman would be too afraid to challenge the NRA.