I think the whole Americans Elect idea is stupid, but I acknowledge that there is an honest desire to move beyond the gridlock in Washington DC. If the Republican and Democratic parties were a married couple, any sane person would tell them to forget about counseling because the rot in their relationship is too deep for reconciliation. The only solution is divorce.
I can’t really keep this analogy going, but it’s a mistake to think that the politicians who have shown the most inclination to play nice with the other side are better people than the partisans, or that they’d be better leaders, or that they’d produce better policies. The problem in Washington isn’t that there aren’t enough Joe Liebermans or Bob Kerreys. And there’s a reason that people who pay attention to politics do not like Chuck Hagel or Lamar Alexander or Ben Nelson. The best you can say for these folks is that they (very rarely) say something true that other politicians are unwilling to concede.
Let me try to put this another way. The reason that Joe Lieberman is popular with Republicans and has a reputation for centrism is because he is so aggressively wrong on foreign policy. His dishonest cheerleading of the neo-conservatives is what got him kicked out of the Democratic Party. Unless you think we need to return to neo-conservative foreign policies, Joe Lieberman’s centrism is not only worthless, but incredibly dangerous.
It’s unclear how Ben Nelson, Chuck Hagel, or Lamar Alexanders’ aversion to tax increases make them any different from the radical Republicans who traded a budget surplus for a $15 trillion debt.
I’m not saying the Democrats are right about everything, but the middle ground between the GOP and the Dems is already a dangerously delusional place that has been proven wrong about just about everything.
Perhaps most depressingly, that middle ground determines all legislative outcomes, which means you don’t really need a Lierberman-Hagel ticket to wind up with the outcomes they desire. It still matters a great deal who controls the White House and Congress, but that’s mainly for non-legislative reasons or because controlling the congressional calendar can limit the damage done by the other side. If President Lieberman and Vice-President Hagel had sat down to do health care reform in 2009. they probably would have produced something indistinguishable from the Affordable Care Act. That’s not to take credit away from President Obama and Vice-President Biden, it’s just to make clear that the “centrists” in Congress exercise effective veto power already. They don’t need more power.
I’d be more interested in a campaign to ask why we still have a House of Lords, and why our House of Lords requires 60% to do anything. Without that little snag, we wouldn’t need the parties to cooperate.
