Both sides of the political divide like to heap abuse on politicians who position themselves near the middle. DINOs and RINOs, we like to call them. And I think the abuse is sometimes warranted. On the other hand, I think that, overall, the Democratic and Republican senators that we have serving in the middle right now are a better cast of characters than the ones we had in the Bush Era or the early stages of the Obama administration. Gone are infuriating personas like Evan Bayh, Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, Kent Conrad, Blanche Lincoln, and Arlen Specter. They are replaced with folks like Amy Klobuchar, Angus King, Joe Donnelly, Heidi Heitkamp, Kelly Ayotte, and Mike Johanns.
Even the most conservative Democrat, Joe Manchin of West Virginia (who goes off message and off the reservation with regularity), seems to have a lot of basic integrity. Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski was defeated in a Republican primary and won the general election as a write-in candidate. She seems to have been liberated by the experience.
There are still some leftovers from the Bush Era who have the ability to annoy, like Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Susan Collins of Maine, and John McCain is like a national rash that won’t go away, but the middle of the Senate is a more congenial place than it used to be, populated by people who seem to have more common sense than in the past.
And this matters, because once this shutdown crisis is over, the Senate will return to regular order and compromises will need to be hashed out. Over the last several years, compromises have proved impossible, but that may be about to change. If there was a point to this whole fiasco, it was to prove that compromises have to be made. The public will not tolerate more gridlock.
