So Much For All That, Part N+1

When Ohio's voters last week rejected at the ballot the state's new law barring public employees' longstanding right to collective bargaining, Gov. John Kasich said, chastened, that the law moved too far, too fast. What a common phrase this is among politicians this century: George W. Bush said some version after his attempt to privatize Social Security quickly imploded after his re-election as president. Democrats said some version two years ago when their relatively liberal agenda led to widespread losses at the ballot. And now, numerous ultra-conservative state ballot referenda have been defeated at the polls and Kasich's political partner, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who signed the first, most controversial anti-union bill, will likely be the subject of a recall next year. (His approval ratings are in the high 40s.)

Politicians, post-election, rush to the far reaches of their party's territory and voters yank them back the first chance they can, yet politicians don't seem to learn. It appears Congressional Republicans will avoid the same fate next year, only because President Obama is so tightly linked with our economic morass (which is fair, though he and many, many others share responsibility). But at least Congress' approval rating was somewhere in the 30s during the Democratic majority -- now it's at 9 percent -- and polls routinely show that people disapprove of Republicans' unquenchable thirst for laying waste to government while protecting, if not expanding, income tax cuts for the wealthiest. I assume they continue to rush there because that 9 percent, or whoever represents the base sitting at the extreme, is the most vocal of their supporters.

Paul Krugman often writes that to sit at the center is to be wishy-washy, valuing one hand and the other hand without ever settling on a definitive position. But to be at the center doesn't exclusively mean to be fuzzy and without conviction. It can mean having conviction in certain approaches, policies or beliefs, while recognizing that they don't have to originate from one party exclusively. The route to a goal doesn't always lie along one path. Convincing elected officials of this is quite difficult, though, which is why we keep running from one far end of the field to the other.

Update: In her recent reportage on Planned Parenthood, Jill Lepore snuck this in: "[Americans United for Life], like the Planned Parenthood Fund, is 'nonpartisan,' a word that no longer has any meaning." Well, it still has a literal meaning -- supporting specific policies and not caring from which party they come. But Lepore is right that it's now devoid of practical meaning because when you name a policy -- women's health care, the Second Amendment, etc -- you know automatically which party supports it and which one party opposes it. Nearly all overlap between the two has disappeared and everyone stays on his end of the field.