Centerfield

Good points here. For the Dems to have a chance of winning in 2008, IMHO they need to nominate someone like Mark Warner-- a Southern governor, who's appealing to the liberal base but at least *appears* centrist enough (and sensible enough) to capture moderates and even some Republicans. He's proven he can achieve this in Virginia, very much the conservative state. The Dems can't win with Hillary or Kerry or any of their other tired Northeastern picks.

Heehee. Hillary is a northeastern pick? Hope the rest of the GOP is as careful in the '08 campaign...

I see a long discussion about making the Democrat party into the centrist party, but none whatsoever about doing the same with the Republican party. Why does the author totally fail to consider or discuss the idea? This half of the article is simply missing.

The author says the Republicans have a "hard-right strategy of driving their party toward its natural extreme." Voters disagree with the author's assessment of which party is more extreme. Moderates and centrists are more likely to vote Republican. If this were not true, if Republicans didn't have the bigger tent, they wouldn't control both houses of congress and the presidency as they do today.

Once upon a time, Democrats had a near lock on congress for decades. Could Democrats learn from the past, what was different? Back then, leftists didn't have a lock on the leadership and purse strings of the party. Democrats didn't put extremists like Michael Moore in seats of honor next to former presidents at their party convention. There were plenty of Democrat conservatives in congress. There were Democrat congressmen leaders credible and serious on national security issues, like Sam Nunn and Scoop Jackson. There were plenty of conservative Democrats in the South. Southern voters didn't leave the Democrat party, the Democrat party left them.

The author bemoans the image of the party being leftist, when the majority of the Democrat electorate isn't. This is true, but why is there is no discussion about why this image is so? Could it be because the spokespeople and leaders of the party are consistently on the far left? How well does Howard Dean's ravings go over with the typical voter? Could it be because extremist special interest group money has a death grip on the party? The Democrat leadership plan for reaching the middle only consists of image management to campaign as a centrist, while still actually governing on the far left. Are voters fooled?

Maybe part of the answer could be found by looking at the primary process, which totally ignored a centrist like Lieberman, while putting forward Kerry, who had among the most liberal voting records in the Senate. If the party wants to take a bigger share of the center, then more moderate candidates must have a chance to survive the primary.

Susan,

You do make some good points, but I do have to disagree with one statement: Southern voters didn't leave the Democrat party, the Democrat party left them. Yes, they left them when they decided African-Americans had the right to vote. Of course, that's not why the South trends Republican now--it's more of a social conservatism--but the civil rights issue was the initiator of the trend.

Before I get accused of saying that all Southern Republicans are racist, let me just emphatically say that I couldn't disagree with that statement more. In fact, I happen to be both--Southern and Republican. It's a different decade, different issues.

I do think Mark Warner has a compelling story for the Dem's. If he was going to run for Prez; however, he would probably need to pull a Bush and find a Dick Cheney to add foriegn policy expertise to his impressive resume.

Two points:
1) Neither party has enough introspection to accurately judge if its "centrist" or "centrist enough"
2)To parapharse from Austin Powers, as a Centrist I feel like I've been "thrown a friggin' bone"

The best judge of centrist inclusion is winning national elections. It's an extremely relative guage, though. If you're winning national elections, you're probably a wee bit closer to the middle than the other guys. At least, you're getting enough of the middle to win.

AR, it is interesting to review civil rights history.

Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president, famous for the Emancipation Proclamation, which Democrats opposed. It was Democrats who opposed the Thirteenth Amendment prohibiting slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing equal protection, and the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteeing voting rights.

Democats were the ones who opposed Teddy Roosevelt's anti-lynching legislation.

Democrats institutionalized Jim Crow, implemented school segregation, and established poll taxes and literacy tests to keep non-whites from voting.

In votes on twenty-six civil rights acts from 1933 to 1964, Democrats voted against civil rights legislation 80 percent of the time, while Republicans voted in favor of the the same legislation 96 percent of the time.

It was a Democrat who ordered the internment of Japanese-American citizens during WWII. Democrats were behind the Chinese exclusion acts and licensing requirements that discriminated against non-white businesses and tradesmen.

Democrats had two times the percentage opposing the 1964 civil rights act as Republicans. The most senior Democrat in the Senate today, Robert Byrd, once founded and led a KKK chapter, and filibustered the civil rights act for 14 straight hours. Al Gore's father voted against the civil rights act. Bull Connor and George Wallace were Democrats.

Which party is more agressively reaching out to minorities today? Which party is increasing its share of minority voters from election to election?

Susan, what I think Abel was noting was that prior to the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965), the Democrats were holding together FDR's winning-- if dyslexic-- coalition of big government liberals, the intellectual elite, labor, and Southern conservatives who were outright hostile to racial equality (and hijacked the states' rights movement for several decades). Indeed, the Democrats were less sensitive to the concerns of racial and ethnic minorities than were the Republicans during this time period.

But passage of those two Acts, as well as the school integration and forced busing issues that followed, drove a wedge into that Coalition. Combined with the rise of the New Left and the collapse of the Liberal Consensus (which essentially led to the Democratic rejection of a strong anti-Communist foreign policy), Nixon's legendary "Southern strategy," and the emergence of social issues as major campaign issues, the Democrats and Southern conservatives drifted further and further apart. Today, it has far less to do with voting rights (no longer such a hot button issue), and far more to do with social issues.

But Abel's right in so much as it was opposition to civil rights that drove the initial wedge between Southern racists and the Democratic Party under whom they had always belonged.

P.S. I would add that today's electoral demographics aren't beneficial for ethnic and racial minorities, at all. Because African-Americans (especially) vote so heavily for the Democrats, there's no incentive for the Republicans to address any of their concerns.

Conversely (and perversely), the Democrats thereby know that African-Americans have nowhere else to go and so they also have no incentive to search for real policies and programs that could benefit blacks in this country, and instead just continue to peddle the "feel sorry for yourself" and big government "solutions" that don't uplift anyone from anything. In essence, African-Americans are being taken advantage of by a Democratic establishment because they have nowhere else to go (politically).

This President has made major efforts to break that monopoly with Latinos (where he has succeeded), and to a much lesser degree of success with blacks and Jews. And I think that's a good thing for everyone, but it remains to be seen how successful he will be in enlarging the "big tent." I've blogged a little bit about this with the GOP's monopoly on the military, and many of the issues covered here are covered there.

The story of civil rights and the formation and history of the parties is a fascinating one, and I suggest everyone check it out. I also suggest not reading too much into the party positions and behavior of fifty or a hundred years ago as applied to the parties today, though. They do change.

I also suggest not reading too much into the party positions and behavior of fifty or a hundred years ago as applied to the parties today, though. They do change.

And enormously, at that!