Centerfield

Well, your premise is just wrong. My reaction to him, as an independent, has nothing to do with "party", and everything to do with results.

Education? He needs to put money where his mouth is. Please tell me what is his "record of achievement"? Schools are identified as having "failed" - so where's the money for the kids to go elsewhere? Their parents don't have it. Oh yeah, vouchers. Your local taxes, right? Name me a state that isn't cutting back on education spending.

Trade? Democrats - and I'm not one - do not like the steel industry protectionist tariffs - that policy is costing the automotive industry, among others, big money, and losing them jobs. Agriculture? Give me a break. The recent farm bill has everything to do with GWB getting re-elected. And about the price of cotton .... never mind.

Health care - He's done absolutely nothing. You think the Congress talking means something?

What achievements are you talking about?

This president is not moving towards the center.

Welcome, Zagloba!

You've made a good point, which I haven't thought of. The President has taken centrist positions on some domestic policy issues.

It seems that some issues have more significance than others as litmus tests in tribal identity. There really is a cultural divide between the parties, at least at the level of party elites. Bush's overt religiousity is something which to secular-oriented Democrats mark him as "not one of us" Indeed, Lieberman's religiousity is one of the things that gets people whispering that he's "not really a Democrat" I think that economic issues, even taxation, don't hit the same emotional buttons.

Having participated in Democratic Party politics in the 80's, and Republican politics in the 90's before declaring a pox on both houses and becoming an Independent, I can say that there really are cultural differents betweens D's and R's. Being a childless urban professional with an Ivy League education, I definitely fit in with the Democratic elite demographic, even if I'm a maverick politically.

So no, I don't think there is anything Bush can do other than stop being himself before Democratic elite would accept him. As far as rank-and-file Democrats far from the coasts, that may be a different story.

Bush's presidency has been defined not by his domestic policy (which also include gutting the EPA and a large shift of the tax burden away from the wealthy), but by his foreign policy.

Like them or not his foreign policy decisions have been the most far reaching in a generation and are what his presidency should (and in the end will) be judeged by.

Good question, Zagbloda, and a nice basic take on it -- yes, "tribalism reigns".

I don't think there's anything that will bring the activist Democrats around -- the ones actively involved in their party. Those kinds of folks (on both sides) are strongly "tribal", as you put it -- they believe in the folks on their side and view the other side in stridently negative terms.

There may very well be things Bush can do to bring rank-and-file Democrats around. Some of them already support him. A bunch more will if the economy improves and if things go well in Iraq. That's the kind of practical bottom line that Americans in general will use to judge this administration.

As for my own reaction, I haven't credited Bush much for the positions on the issues you mention -- education, Medicare, and trade. I'm generally disappointed with our national education policy -- not just Bush's plan, but everything going back through the Clinton era policies and prior. I'm quite leary of spending a large new chunk of money on Medicare. And I disagree with protectionist trade policies.

But I'm not mainly looking for the president to "get it right" on these issues. In a sense, I think it all boils down to the two broad issues mentioned above that most Americans will use to judge the president -- foreign policy and the economy.

And I think they're tied together -- a point that's underestimated by most observers. I have a sneaking suspicion our economic fluctuations and uncertainty of the last few years are due in part to nervousness about the war on terror, the Iraq war, and our overall position in the world.

I don't think Bush is the kind of leader we had during both the Reagan and Clinton eras -- someone who projects optimism, smiles a lot, and generally reassures people that things are going pretty good. I think that's the kind of leadership that would help us most right now.

I don't think that GWB really has a choice but to pursue the center-left to some extent. Like you said, the election was won by the slimmest of margins, so he's had to try to increase his hold on the center politically.

It's not liberal Dems he's going for. He's going for the center (read: us). Personally, I'd say he's been a decent President. (I thought, other than his personal issues, that Clinton wasn't really that bad either except for perhaps a lack of initiative for foreign policy.) So we should evaluate him by what we think of him, because that's who he's going for. Strangely, there don't seem to be many left-centrists among the Dem candidates that I've seen.

The sad truth is that the party system has reached the point in our nation today that the True Believers on the one side have grown to hate the other side. So much that they refuse to acknowledge that anything the other side is good and seek only to discredit them rather than trying to work within the system. (The solution to any issue they have with the President: the independent prosecutor who is neither of those things.) The goal has become absolute power for each party. It's good that they'll never get it!

I agree that tribalism reigns. So much of the thinking of party members seems to be "our guys vs their guys" without giving any real consideration to the issue or character involved. Add to that the pandering that each party does to its hard-core base, and it seems to me that an awful lot of of otherwise intelligent people check their brains at the door when it comes to deciding what's actually right for the future of the United States.

I see it in my own family, where we absolute cannot discuss politics, even though we are largely all in the center and pretty much in agreement on issues. But as soon as anything connected to actually voting gets involved, the Democrats and the Republicans are both "you guys - our guys" and my sister and I (both independents) just get disgusted and go for a walk. There's something about bringing up the party that just seems to turn off the ability to reason.

Bill Clinton was the first Democrat for whom I ever voted for President. I didn't feel strongly opposed to Bush I, just that he didn't seem to articulate any vision for the future and instead seemed to expect re-election as a reward for his first four years. Clinton was sufficiently centrist that, frankly, I thought he would have made a credible Republican president (in fact, I've heard left-wing Democrats calls him "the best Republican President we ever had").

All of that said, I find myself voting for the Democrats more and more ... and not because I especially like the Democrats, but because I am aghast about what the Republicans have let themselves become.

I didn't vote for GWB, largely because he seemed to me even during the campaign to be someone who had been selected because of his name -- there were some issues of character that bothered me (that said, had he been running against Clinton I might have voted for him, since I really felt betrayed by Clinton on the character issue), and he seemed to me to be pretty ignorant about foreign affairs ("ignorance" is something that I define as uneducated, and uninterested in becoming educated). On the other hand, I was reassured that he seemed to have the Bush I team in foreign affairs behind him, and while not perfect, I thought they had done a pretty good job in that area in a very difficult time. So I was disappointed, but not devastated, when he won.

What has politicized me has been the government by ideology. It's an ideology that I feel is extremist and immensely dangerous for the future of the country, but I think that ANY ideology, no matter how well-meaning, is fundamentally flawed.

Ideologies mean playbooks and fixed ways of interpreting the world. The world is too complicated and too mutable to cast a set of plays in concrete and then just apply them, and I think we see the result in how the Iraq war play got pulled out and run when the problem was of a very different nature against a very different enemy.

Worse, ideologies by their nature lead to "faith-based decisions," in the sense of Mark Twain's definition of faith, in that they dictate the framework in which you look at the world. If your ideology says that "we are the bastion of freedom and everyone believes that," then it follows that our enemies "hate us because we are the bastion of freedom." It shuts down any ability to look for any other reasons, and you interpret everything you see within only that framework.

Ideologies in that sense are a lot like religions, but when you couple a political ideology with a religious ideology, they get a lot worse! Political ideologies ultimately fall apart when they just get too far from the reality that exists to stand up any longer -- pretty much the reason that Communism fell apart as an ideology, because at the end of the day, it just didn't work. But religious ideologies don't even begin with a reality base - they're on another plane entirely.

So, at least for me, the matter of party has become an issue of ideology. If the Republicans would move to the center -- which means move away from the PNAC-based ideological foreign policy, away from the religious right and strongly towards freedom of religion (and freedom to have no religion), and get some real economists who understand that "conservatism" doesn't mean charging everything you want today to your credit cards and that tax policies can be used for more than just getting elected -- then I would vote for them.

As a centrist independent, I -want- to have two parties vying for my vote, because I truly believe that rapid and radical change in any direction doesn't give us enough of a chance to deal with the Law of Unintended Consequences. But I'm afraid that to get my vote now, the Republicans are going to have to have their own regime change and toss the ideologues -- throwing a bone to the center in terms of a bill or initiative isn't going to do it.

The Bush people ought to listen to you, Ducktape.

I'm hearing from a number of former Republicans who are changing to Independent or Democrat. Even if it's small, this is the first R2D trend I've seen in 20 years! In the last decade, it's been much more common to hear of Dem's turning to the GOP.

The president needs to do something about it or he'll come in 2nd in the popular vote again.

Indeed, Rick, but they are incapable of it... specifically because their ideology won't let them. It's one of those conundrums, that if they could listen, they wouldn't have to.

Further, I don't think that GWB is capable of doing anything about it because I really don't believe that he's the one in charge of the agenda.

Actually, probably the best thing that could happen to the Republican Party in the grand scheme of things is for them to lose the Presidency in 2004. No one ever learns anything from their successes, and there is no impetus to change except when the pain of staying the way you are outweighs the pain of change.

I don't think there is much hope for them until the Tom Delays and the Texas GOP Platform are discredited in the eyes of those who care about the future of the Republican Party. (Have you read the Texas platform? Incredible!). If the extremists fall on their faces, then the moderates of the party really have an opportunity to turn the ship back on course.

As I Republican I was always a little mystified at some the reaction to Clinton because in many ways after his first two years, he was a good Republican President, certainly more centrist than liberal who allowed the Republican congress to dictate policy to an unprecedented degree.

The Republicans are a lot closer to the center than the Dems now ( not hard to do). They have also over the last 10 years, marginalized their ideologues, the religious right to a degree. They would move further to the center if the DEMS were not so controlled by the far left now.