Word: centrists
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...much-fetishized heartland, which makes attacks on them a tougher sell to swing voters. And they have an advantage within the Democratic base as well: while party leaders have long assumed that only a Southerner could successfully take the White House, the party faithful have been skeptical of the centrist politics of many Southern candidates...
Just as more centrist Democrats like Bill Clinton emerged in the wake of Ronald Reagan's triumphs, more pragmatic Republicans like Crist, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, Indiana governor Mitch Daniels and even conservative Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal will likely be the phoenixes that rise from the GOP ashes of 2008. (None, however, will yet say if they plan to mount their own presidential bids in 2012.) As a result, says Leslie Lenkowsky, a public affairs professor at Indiana University who served with Daniels in the Bush Administration, "the future of the Republican Party is going...
...Obama's cross-party appeal was his clarion call to end America's corrosive red-blue polarization. Republican pols like Crist may take that ideal even more seriously than the hyperpartisan likes of Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. It's a long shot, but a more centrist-minded GOP could be the country's best guarantor against the Democrats indulging their own more extremist urges...
Perhaps the biggest determinant of how Obama's agenda will fare in coming months will be whether Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid can control their respective members. Liberals want Obama to pursue tax hikes on the rich and tax cuts for everyone else as soon as possible; centrist Southern Blue Dogs want him to tackle entitlement reform. Resolving the competing agendas will be tricky...
...Whose side will Obama be on? The old Ted Kennedy liberals he re-inspired, the Blue Dog Democrats he courted, the new arrivals from purple and even red districts whose shelf life depends on a centrist agenda? He has talked about the need to fix entitlements, but try to pin him down on the Audacity of How, and he vanished in a foam of contingency. He has promised to end the war in Iraq responsibly, but the tension between end and responsibility tightens now. He voted for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, but there are bound...