WSJ _CAPITAL JOURNAL_ (http://online.wsj.com/public/search?article-doc-type={Capital+Journal}&HEADER_TEXT=capital+journal) OCTOBER 12, 2010 The Rise of Middle-of-the-Road Radicals
By : GERALD F. SEIB In American politics, people tend to think of "radicals" as those on the ideological fringes of the left or right. But what happens when the radicals are smack in the middle of the political spectrum? That may be the picture we're looking at today. Many of those seriously estranged from the political system and its practitioners appear to sit in the political center. They are shaping this year's campaign, but equally important is the question of what happens to them after the election Nov. 2, and especially on the road toward the next presidential campaign in 2012. Two big forces are driving this year's congressional campaign, and pushing it in the direction of Republicans. The first is an exceptionally high level of intensity among conservatives and core Republican voters, who give every sign of showing up in high numbers on Election Day. But the other big force is political independents—voters who have no particular allegiance to either party and who don't tend to have strong ideological leanings. These are the voters who drifted toward the Democrats in 2006, allowing them to take over control of the House from Republicans. Then they jumped firmly onto Barack Obama's bandwagon in 2008, ousting Republicans from the White House and making Mr. Obama the first Democrat to win a majority of the national vote since Jimmy Carter. Now they have turned again, and are pushing the system the other way. "For the third national election in a row, independent voters may be poised to vote out the party in power," summarized the Pew Research Center in a recent study of independent voters. These independent voters have become something like a band of nomad marauders, roaming across the American political landscape, hungry, angry and taking out their frustrations on the villages of the Democrats and Republicans in turn. The fact that their fury is aimed more at Democrats this year shouldn't leave Republicans thinking they have won the permanent allegiance of these nomads, who, lest we forget, were just two years ago pillaging the land of George W. Bush. These voters appear to be pragmatic more than ideological. They were prepared to vote for more government activism just two years ago—how could they not have expected that in choosing Mr. Obama over John McCain?—but now have decided they got more government activism than they bargained for. They appear to want government to tackle health care, but didn't like the solution the Democrats cooked up. They appear to think the government overspends, though they seemed to think that of the Bush administration as well as the Obama administration. Mostly they want solutions—economic and job-creating solutions—and they seem to think Democrats have failed to provide them. They also thought that of Republicans previously. And they seem to think this failure to produce in Washington is, at least in some measure, the result of both parties being in the thrall of "special interests," a term with various definitions. Some of this frustration is being channeled into the tea-party movement, but not all of it by any means. The tea-party movement is more conservative, and more Republican at heart, than many of these independent voters appear to be. Indeed, in a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, about a third of independents expressed affinity for the tea-party movement, while a larger share—59%—said they weren't tea-party supporters. Put another way, many independent voters, unlike many tea-party activists, aren't reflexively against government action to solve problems. They simply think government is failing. So, many of these independents appear to be reversing ground again this year, and are preparing to vote Republican. And perhaps Republicans will secure the lasting loyalty of these independents after the election by proving that they have market-based solutions to core economic problems. But perhaps the tea-party influence will push the Republican Party too far to the right for many of these independents. And perhaps Mr. Obama will tack too far to the left in the next two years, to protect his liberal flank and preclude the possibility that he, like Jimmy Carter in 1980, faces a primary challenger from his party's liberal base when he seeks re-election. If that's what happens after this year's election, Washington may descend into true partisan and ideological gridlock, and independent voters' frustration and estrangement may only grow. And that won't be a small thing, for the Pew study found that more voters now identify themselves as independents— 37%—than as Republicans (29%) or Democrats (34%). So this roaming army of independent nomads is getting pretty large. And who knows? If neither party can pacify it, maybe, just maybe, the army carries the seeds of a third-party challenge in 2012. -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
