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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dale Baker who wrote (9717)	1/25/2006 10:08:20 AM
From: Suma	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541497

Dale what is a sensible center. If someone can define what that means and where we should all be in our collective thinking then we might have a consensus... (does this make sense ?) I have this fantasy of a candidate who will stand at a podium and talk to the people, without notes, without a prompter and talk sense.. AND talk from the heart with concerns of everyone and addressing why we cannot do this or that, and how come and what we should be doing.. But this will never happen. Listened to the life of John ADAMS the other night on PBS... In those times it was the same thing. He and Jefferson didn't talk for years... over disagreements on politics.. They only made up near the end of their lives.. Same divisive climate, same problems with people. History does repeat itself.

To: Dale Baker who wrote (9717)	1/25/2006 12:54:38 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 541497

I agree to the extent that 1 - Both sides should seriously consider the other sides ideas, and other ideas (including those that might be called "the center") instead of automatically dismissing them and 2 - Even if the idea in the center is not intrinsically better or more sensible than one side's or the other's, it has the benefit that adopting it is likely to result in less conflict and more likely to achieve the support of a durable majority. This can at times be very important. Conflict has the possibility of being destructive. Also even if one or both sides policies are better than the middle, the middle might easily be better than swinging back and forth between the two extremes. OTOH I don't think a position in the center is intrinsically or automatically better. In general I think it is as likely to be correct as the other alternatives (at least if you exclude the extreme off the wall alternatives). Sometimes its worse because the center represents a compromise of the bad parts from either end. There are times (probably not the majority but certainly not rare) where it would be better to have either sides policy implemented rather than a mish mash of the two. Tim