The Problem With the Centrist Dodge

     David Brooks got some well deserved blowback for contuting to use the Republican talking points that the President is holding up a sequester deal by refusing to put forward his own plan.

   "David Brooks, after taking a pounding for basing his column on the idea that Obama has no deficit reduction plan, attaches an addendum to his column admitting that he got it wrong. Sort of, anyway:

It is true, as the director of the Congressional Budget Office has testified, that the administration has not proposed a specific anti-sequester proposal that can be scored or passed into law. It is not fair to suggest, as I did, that tax hikes for the rich is the sole content of the president’s approach. The White House has proposed various constructive changes to spending levels and entitlement programs. These changes are not nearly adequate in my view, but they do exist, and I should have acknowledged the balanced and tough-minded elements in the president’s approach.

    "This is actually a step forward. Brooks is acknowledging, without quite saying so, that one side has a compromise plan and the other doesn’t. After all, he’s acknowledging that Obama’s plan includes some of what both sides want, while as we all know, the other side’s plan is to avert the sequester only though spending cuts, i.e., only through what one side wants."

     http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/02/22/david-brooks-reveals-that-the-center-cannot-hold/

     As Krugman and others have pointed out, the trouble with the centrist dodge of the Very Serious People is that they posture as wanting to see the Sensible Center win in American politics, ignoring the fact that the Democratic party today is the sensibly centrist party-it's demands are hardly radical but in line with public opinion. The Dems are praticallly the Whig Party in truth. You could make the argument that a true conservative would vote liberal Democrtatic-I'm thinking on the lines of Garry Willl's version of consevatiism.

    http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Conservative-Garry-Wills/dp/0140055630/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1361624252&sr=1-1&keywords=garry+wills+confessions+of+a+conservative

   A true conservative should want to minimize-not eliminate-social tensions. The American brand of conservatism we've seen from the Republican party over the last 40 years has at every point exacerbated rather than mitigated social tensions.

   The Dems have a moderate view on taxes and deficits. The GOP has an extreme view:

    "As I’ve noted here before, what we’re witnessing here is probably best described as the “centrist dodge.” Pundits who want to maintain the line that both sides are to blame for the primary impasse that continues to paralyze our politics — the question of whether to fix our fiscal problems only with spending cuts, or with a mix of cuts and revenues from the wealthy — continue to face a basic problem. They essentially agree with Democrats that a mix is the way to go, and see the GOP’s cuts-only approach as extreme and damaging. But they can’t quite say this aloud, because then they’d be taking sides and would no longer be able to maintain their aura of transcending partisanship and sagely occupying the sensible middle ground."

     "These commentators usually get around this in one of two ways. They either simply pretend that Obama and Democrats don’t hold the position they actually hold. In this case, Brooks tried to maintain this fiction, but he did it so flagrantly that he got caught out and had to admit as much. Or they simply claim that Democrats have not quite conceded enough in the direction of the middle ground mix of cuts and revenues they want. That’s what Brooks has now done; while acknowledging his mistake, he still needs to argue that the cuts Obama has proposed are “not nearly adequate enough.”

    If one side insists on only spending cuts the other side with both spending cuts and tax increase how can you argue there's some mythical Sensible Center that both sides fail to occupy? I think that's why the future prospects for the GOP is so dim: the Dems already firmly occupy the Sensible Center.