The Contrived Search for a Middle Way

I must be getting lazy. It's Monday morning, and I'm still thinking about the Sunday papers. Or maybe it is the contrived nature of what my hometown paper (I live in Washington, DC, the new Rome, according to all the book reviews) considers news.

Yesterday's Washington Post all but endorses a third party "independent" bid for the presidency. Between a less than insightful polling story on the many faces of self-identified independent voters and a David Broder column outlining the political space a potential independent candidate could occupy, the paper clearly identifies with what is rapidly emerging as the inside the Beltway consensus: all the announced candidates are pygmies.

What's needed now, these grand poobahs of conventional wisdom assure us, is a candidate who can occupy political real estate that is more precious than a vacant lot on Massachusetts Avenue's embassy row -- the above-it-all center. Too bad Michael Bloomberg and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who recently graced the cover of Time Magazine, are, respectively, a short, Jewish media mogul from ultra-liberal New York and a naturalized citizen from the Left Coast.

They are the archetypes for what is likely to be a major distraction in next year's presidential campaign: the problem-solving man of the middle whose primary appeal is to self-satisfied middle class voters for whom a pox on both your houses is always the preferred non-ideological stance. Never mind that such a candidate stands no chance of getting elected, or, if a freak accident happened and they actually got into the White House, of solving any of the serious problems facing this country (number one in foreign affairs: disengaging from Iraq; number one in domestic affairs: universal health care).

The real purpose of such a candidacy is to deny the winning Democratic candidate a mandate, which is as of this writing the most likely denouement of the gross failures of the Bush administration, the worst in modern American history.

In that regard, my best reading over the weekend was former American Prospect editor Michael Tomasky's review of two new books on Hillary Clinton: Carl Bernstein's "A Woman in Charge" and Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr.'s "Her Way." He's no fan of Clinton. Tomasky has written his own critique of her campaign for the Senate.

But he puts these latest journalistic rehashes, now flying off bookshelves across the country, in their proper context, which also applies to the misconceived search for an independent candidate who could only subtract from the emerging national consensus that a Bush repudiation is in order for 2008. He writes:

(These authors) want to relive the controversies of the Clinton White House. After an unprovoked war built on lies, the deaths of tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, illegal domestic spying, government-sanctioned torture, the indefinite incarceration of suspects, a scandal surrounding efforts by the nation's highest-ranking law enforcement officer to install prosecutors willing to undertake blatantly political prosecutions, and astonishing tales of congressional corruption, is it not at least demeaning and superfluous to be presented with one-thousand-plus pages revisiting such questions as how many hours of billable work Hillary Clinton actually performed for Madison Guaranty? It might not be, if we learned useful new information, about both the Clinton presidency and Hillary's more recent record in the Senate. But "Woman in Charge" and "Her Way" — the former sometimes by intent, the latter almost always inadvertently — tell us less about Mrs. Clinton than they do about the political and journalistic cultures that allowed hysteria about the Clintons to thrive.

Or drumbeats for independent candidates to sound.

Posted by gooznews at July 2, 2007 08:04 AM