Are Democrats hogging the political center?

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last updated 8 January 2015

"The sequestration impasse is so obviously the Republicans' fault," says Timothy Noah at The New Republic, that the Washington punditocracy, "which can't abide an obvious and unchanging story line, is trying hard to invent a new one that blames President Obama." And in a way, it is Obama's fault — albeit obliquely. Right now, the only issue that unites the GOP is solid opposition to new taxes, but that is no more sustainable than its other troublesome tendencies: "Being the anti-immigration party isn't working. Being the anti-gay-marriage party isn't working." But they "can't become 1950s-style 'modern Republicans' right now because that's what the Democrats are!" That's terrible for everyone. For tactical, not ideological reasons, Obama has to stop impersonating Dwight Eisenhower and "start impersonating Franklin Roosevelt or the pre-Vietnam-escalation Lyndon Johnson":

It is, to be sure, a tricky calculus. The center is a pretty comfy place to be. The more Democrats dominate the center, the better their electoral prospects will remain. The more they shift leftward, the less certain these will be. But the governing imperative runs in the opposite direction. The more Democrats dominate the center, the worse their governing prospects will be, because the opposition they try to bargain with will by definition lie outside the center. If Democrats shift leftward, their governing prospects will improve because Republicans will shift leftward, too. Then compromise with Republicans will produce acceptably centrist results.

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.