Ernie: This is VGN ( Very Good News ). While sometimes Friedman makes me ill, he can be a politically correct wimp at times, nonetheless he is entirely capable of serious thought and serious political analysis. And, obviously, he has a large following. This, I think, ought to give RC a real boost. There is a caveat, needless to say. What he has in mind by "Radical Centrism" seems to be the "East Coast School" of our movement, namely that form of RC typified by the Atlantic and New America. Usually that is OK, but sometimes not. Sometimes it is stealth Democratic Party in nature, which you can see quite easily in Mark Satin, EJ Dione, Fallows and Ted Halstead. Or " Democratic Party Lite." Be that as it may, how do we take advantage of this development ? There is a minefield to traverse. This includes "right here in River City," at Centroids, since any meaningful discussion of US politics must include commentary about BHO and the admin. Not just the congress, about which we more-or-less agree is dysfunctional as often as not. Friedman mentioned the bipartisan theme in Obama's campaign, and , while there have been a few stabs at just that, like BHO speaking with the House Republicans a short time ago, otherwise there has been just about no substance behind the idea. The man is mostly clueless about what is actually involved to make RC viable. Not that we are all that great at it, but at least we sometimes are. The thought struck me that what Iraq was to Bush Jr, the whole health care process may become for Obama. All because BHO would not listen to Rahm Emmanuel. How different it would have turned out if there had there first been a small scale health bill based on actual bipartisanship. Which was very doable. Bush didn't listen to voices in his admin, either, telling him to make sure that security must be the highest priority in Iraq and that the old Iraqi military must be put to work immediately so that, at a minimum, a half million young men would be gainfully employed at infrastructure projects and would not be putting their guns to work, instead, making trouble for everyone else. Instead, Bush listened to that utter horse's ass, Rumsfeld, and put Bremmer in charge of year # 1, a doctrinaire free trader who allowed his laissez faire ideology to trump common sense and empirical observations. Anyway, instead of starting with a decent bi-partisan health care bill that could be added to as opportunity arose, with a time-out to focus on fixing the economy, BHO decided to ram through a massive bill with twice as many pages as Hillary Care back in 93. Hardly a surprise that for each good thing in the bill there is something that stinks to high heaven. To this day does Obama understand just how badly he dropped the ball ? Not any more than Bush II understood how badly he mangled Iraq until 3 years of horrific events and the lost election of 2006 finally woke him up. How, then, can we --or any other RC folks-- communicate what most needs to be said ? How can we make bi-partisanship a persuasive alternative to partisanship ? Place the stress in this sentence on the word "persuasive." For if we don't get that right, nothing else really matters. Billy ======================================================= In a message dated 3/26/2010 12:14:22 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, [email protected] writes:
Our friend Thomas L. Friedman pushing the Radical Center. I like many of his ideas, but (as with the NAF) worry that it is still defined in terms of a) reaction, and b) a grab-bag of policies, rather than a coherent new philosophy. - Ernie P. P.S. Yes, DRB, I know you don't like his proposals... http://mobile.nytimes.com/article;jsessionid=F1D5E68C1D76F3A6055E5844372865A D.w5?a=566866&f=28&sub=Columnist OPINION OP-ED COLUMNIST A Tea Party Without Nuts Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times Thomas L. Friedman By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Published: March 24, 2010 President Obama's winning passage of national health care is both exhilarating and sobering. Covering so many uninsured Americans is a historic achievement. But the president had to postpone trips, buy off companies and cut every conceivable side deal to just barely make it happen, without a single Republican vote. If the Democrats now lose seats in the midterm elections, we're headed for even worse gridlock, even though we still have so much more nation-building for America to do - from education to energy to environment to innovation to tax policy. That is why I want my own Tea Party. I want a Tea Party of the radical center. Say what? I write often about innovation in energy and education. But I've come to realize that none of these innovations will emerge at scale until we get the most important innovation of all - political innovation that will empower independents and centrists, which describes a lot of the country. Larry Diamond, a Stanford University democracy expert, put it best: "If you don't get governance right, it is very hard to get anything else right that government needs to deal with. We have to rethink in some basic ways how our political institutions work, because they are increasingly incapable of delivering effective solutions any longer." My definition of broken is simple. It is a system in which Republicans will be voted out for doing the right thing (raising taxes when needed) and Democrats will be voted out for doing the right thing (cutting services when needed). When your political system punishes lawmakers for the doing the right things, it is broken. That is why we need political innovation that takes America's disempowered radical center and enables it to act in proportion to its true size, unconstrained by the two parties, interest groups and orthodoxies that have tied our politics in knots. 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. How best to promote these hybrid ideas? Break the oligopoly of our two-party system. Diamond suggests two innovations. First, let every state emulate California's recent grass-roots initiative that took away the power to design state electoral districts from the state legislature and put it in the hands of an independent, politically neutral, Citizens Redistricting Commission. It will go to work after the 2010 census and reshape California's state legislative districts for the coming elections. Henceforth, districts in California will not be designed to be automatically Democratic or Republican - so more of them will be competitive, so more candidates will only be electable if they appeal to the center, not just cater to one party. (There is a movement pressing for the same independent commission to be given the power to redraw Congressional districts.) Second, get states to adopt "alternative voting." One reason independent, third-party, centrist candidates can't get elected is because if, in a three-person race, a Democrat votes for an independent, and the independent loses, the Democrat fears his vote will have actually helped the Republican win, or vice versa. Alternative voting allows you to rank the independent candidate your No. 1 choice, and the Democrat or Republican No. 2. Therefore, if the independent does not win, your vote is immediately transferred to your second choice, say, the Democrat. Therefore, you have no fear that in voting for an independent you might help elect your real nightmare - the Republican. Nothing has held back the growth of independent, centrist candidates more, said Diamond, "than the fear that if you vote for one of them you will be wasting your vote. Alternative voting, which Australia has, can overcome that." 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.) If that radical center wants to be empowered, it can't just whine. It needs its own grass-roots movement to promote reforms like nonpartisan redistricting and alternative voting in every state. It's tea time for the center. 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