Extremely Lame

I, for one, would love to see a resurgence in political moderates. My generation has pretty much known nothing of the sort in the U.S. legislature. All we’ve seen is the rapid polarization of both parties, the Democrats getting way more liberal, the Republicans getting way more conservative, and the moderates being left in the cold.  It’s led to the party leadership to treating politics less as a way to make the United States stronger and more as a means to weaken the opposing party. See: the increased numbers of filibusters in the past decade or so.

On Meet the Press, Mike Huckabee recently said that the Republican “brand” has been seriously damaged, but said that it’s a good thing that John McCain is the nomination because he isn’t a traditional highly conservative Republican and has a history of working across the aisle, even in recent memory. See: the Kennedy-McCain Amendment on immigration and his stance as one of the Gang of 14 when Republicans were threatening to reduce the cloture vote to a bare majority to end a filibuster instead of the 3/5 currently needed.

Harold Ford, Jr., a Democrat from Tennessee, on the same program, stated that Democrats have a lot of things to learn from the recent Democratic special election wins in Mississippi and Louisiana. He said that these wins were because they ran as moderate or conservative Democrats, and that the more that Obama leans toward the center, the more success he’s going to have.

Mike Murphy, a strategist for the Republican Party, had this to say:

“If McCain runs the campaign that he’ll naturally want to run, I think he’ll be the most powerful possible Rubublican candidate because he’s a change agent in Washington. The question is, will the rest of the Republican Party get out of the way and align themselves to follow him?”

This is indeed a good question. Murphy continues:

“A hundred days ago, I would say that McCain would have real internal problems in the party doing that. Now, after these defeats, everyone’s a McCain-iac now in the House of Representatives, which is a change, but a good one. And I think McCain is well positioned to do well if he runs the campaign that he really is, which is a centrist and a change agent.”

So far, however, it appears as if McCain’s doing just the opposite. He seems to be running as a conservative. Moderates are balking at his changing platforms and a lot of traditional conservatives and neo-conservatives aren’t too fond of him because of his long Senate record of not doing what the Republican leadership wanted.

While the House of Representatives and other elected Republicans may be rallying around McCain, getting Republican voters to do the same may be a lot more difficult. Just take a look at Michelle Malkin’s post on the implosion over the RNCC’s attempt to ride out this damage by trotting out a new slogan about “the change you deserve.”

On the one hand, I’m kind of glad to see some of the more reactionary Republicans feel disenfranchised. It’s also really refreshing to see Republican voters recognizing neo-conservatives for the parasites they are and how they’re taking their party for all it can and leaving it little more than a hollowed husk. On the other hand, I really don’t like the idea of anyone having no party that they agree with. Perhaps, if we’re lucky, we’ll see a good deal more support for the Libertarian Party, and to a lesser extent, the Constitution Party. Of course, that’s extremely unlikely because third parties have a tendency to put way too much emphasis on national candidates and need to put far more emphasis on local candidates as a long term strategy.