Sunday, October 07, 2007
What about the middle?
Dan Radmacher
Recent columns
- Kaine saw much progress in his four years
- Virginia voted for gridlock on Tuesday
- Project Vote Smart tries to educate Virginia voters
- America should listen to this Cassandra
From the RoundTable blog
Where have all the moderates gone? Studies of voting patterns in Congress show a more polarized body than the nation has seen in 100 years.
For decades, a graph of congressional political leanings would have mirrored that of the population at large: a bell curve with a few extremely partisan members on either end of the spectrum and the great mass somewhere in the middle.
Now, that's been inverted. Thanks to decades of gerrymandering on the part of both parties, the nation has been divided largely into congressional districts that are safe for one party or the other. That puts the real competition for the seat at the party primary level where moderate candidates have difficulty surviving.
The middle has been abandoned, leaving a huge gulf between two partisan extremes.
This pattern is mirrored at the state level as well. In Virginia, for instance, even though all 140 seats in the General Assembly are up for election, less than half will be contested in the November election. Incumbents either faced no competition, or races were decided by primaries or caucuses.
On top of that, the state Senate lost a slew of Republican moderates to retirement this year, increasing the chances that the next General Assembly will be even more polarized.
This trend is not in the national interest.
As congressional Republicans amply proved in their 12-year congressional reign, governing took a backseat to the accumulation of power -- and the money from special interests needed to retain that power.
Partisan sniping has totally supplanted reasoned debate. The two sides don't even appear to be arguing from the same set of facts.
Frustration with this state of affairs appears to be growing, though, even among officeholders. At a session during the annual convention of the National Conference of Editorial Writers in Kansas City, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., bemoaned how difficult it is in Congress to get "out of political mode and [into] a public policy mode."
Part of the problem, McCaskill said, is the increasingly nasty tone of today's elections. It's hard to sit down and make nice with representatives of a party that spent an entire campaign trashing you and going after your family, McCaskill said.
Beyond that, there are few structures remaining in place within Congress that encourage members to get to know one another on a personal level.
Back when Ronald Reagan was president, he and then-House Speaker Tip O'Neill were famous for being able to duke it out politically, then meet for a drink. Knowing each other as individuals made them less likely to engage in vicious political attacks against one another.
McCaskill wondered whether the dismal 14 percent public approval rating of Congress was a sign that the public was nearing a tipping point where a third party might have a real opportunity to gain power.
Short of that still extremely unlikely shift, McCaskill sees some opportunity for making things better. For instance, Sen. Joe Lieberman recently took McCaskill up on her suggestion to alternate Democrats and Republicans around the table during meetings of the Homeland Security Committee he chairs. Before, members of the two parties sat across from each other.
McCaskill said she ended up sitting next to Virginia's Sen. John Warner. She couldn't say for sure, but she wondered whether getting to know him better as a result made it easier for her to talk with him about the measure she and Sen. James Webb cosponsored to establish an independent commission to investigate military contracts. Warner ended up supporting the amendment, which passed by a wide margin.
I don't know if such a small sign of progress is worth celebrating. Warner, after all, is a moderate Republican -- who is retiring next year.
But I do know this: Politically, Congress does not look like America. Most Americans are not ideological. The most abiding interest of most Americans is not the state of the Democratic or Republican parties, but the state of the nation.
That 14 percent approval rating for Congress also demonstrates that most Americans don't believe their representatives in Washington are doing much to improve the state of the nation.
If Democrats and Republicans can't be convinced to put such concerns ahead of partisan interest, then McCaskill may be right about the possible ascendancy of a third party.
Radmacher is the editorial page editor of The Roanoke Times.
