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

To: Cogito who wrote (192046)	6/19/2012 9:44:11 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 543697

Yep.. Plouffe tells Lizza that “if both chambers are more evenly divided, it could be a recipe for actually getting some things done. Because of the closeness, neither party’s going to be able to do anything on its own, so either zero gets done for two years or there is kind of a center.” ..you can't cooperate with people who have no interest in cooperating; who are interested in not cooperating, actually. It's a one way street. Message 28112782 The electoral ratchet permits movement only in the rightward direction. The Republican role is fairly clear; the Republicans apply the torque that rotates the thing rightward. The Democrats' role is a little less obvious. The Democrats are the pawl. They don't resist the rightward movement -- they let it happen -- but whenever the rightward force slackens momentarily, for whatever reason, the Democrats click into place and keep the machine from rotating back to the left. Here's how it works. In every election year, the Democrats come and tell us that the country has moved to the right, and so the Democratic Party has to move right too in the name of realism and electability. Gotta keep these right-wing madmen out of the White House, no matter what it takes. (Actually, they don't say they're going to move to the right; they say they're going to move to the center. But of course it amounts to the same thing, if you're supposed to be left of center. It's the same direction of movement.) So now the Democrats have moved to the "center." But of course this has the effect of shifting the "center" farther to the right. Now, as a consequence, the Republicans suddenly don't seem so crazy anymore -- they're closer to the center, through no effort of their own, because the center has shifted closer to them. So they can move even further right, and still end up no farther from the "center" than they were four years ago.