Ain't Nothing Centrist About Them

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut/455511/ain_t_nothing_centrist_about_them

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At this moment -- when 72 percent of the nation supports a public plan option and 14,000 people lose their healthcare every day -- the House Blue Dogs and conservative Democratic Senators are doing just about everything they can to cripple real health care reform.

So why does the media keep ceding them the label of "centrist" or "moderate" as if they are the guardians of mainstream values?

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Even a good regional paper like Louisville's Courier-Journal-- in rightly blasting the Blue Dogs as "deplorable" for being "unable to muster the spine to pay for health care reform with even so innocuous a measure as higher taxes on the richest 1 percent of Americans"--calls them "centrist".

The danger is that promoting the view that these conservative Democrats are somehow at the center of our politics plays into the hands of those who would like to marginalize progressives as far outside of the mainstream. (And I have no doubt K Street is advising Republicans to constantly refer to their Democratic allies as "moderate" and "centrist".) It also misrepresents what most Americans want from the government in these times.

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As Drew Westen, professor of psychology at Emory University, founder of Westen Strategies, and author of the invaluable The Political Brain, told me: "The average American, according to all available data, has largely moved slightly left of where it was in the Reagan years, and with changing demographics, it will be far left of Reagan and Bush in twenty years. So to call Democrats who are substantially right of the center of the electorate (let alone of their party), like Heath Shuler, 'moderates,' is both to misrepresent the center of political gravity in the general electorate and in the Democratic Party."

How we tell the story of this battle for health care reform matters and will impact whether the battle is won or lost. So-called "centrists" are far from the center of this debate. They are, in fact, out of touch and out of the mainstream -- like the rest of their conservative brethren.

the gullible including the Media buy this Moderate Bull, let
alone Centrist.

They are Center Right--there is a helluva difference between
Center Right and a little right of Center.

Tom Delay set the standard and they followed choking on the Kool-Aid.

Thanks for informing and keep at it.

These Democrats are capitulating opportunists, kneeling at the feet of Big Corporations. They are far to the right of Obama who won a historic election with 9.5 million more than "the old man yelling at crowd", and they damn well know he has been given a huge mandate by the American people.

The perception they're perpetrating is that of a weak Democratic party so that those in our country that are less astute (working three jobs or worrying whether or not you'll have a roof over your head tomorrow will do that to you) will try the Rethugs again and the Republicrats can once again shrug shoulders, vote with the majority, and get large corporate checks dumped on their desks.

These people need to get out of the Democratic Party and campaign as the "R's" that they are. See if they'll get re-elected.

Gawd, they make my blood boil! :mad:

Surely there are a few with some affairs, tax issues, undocumented domestic help, etc. Let's burn a couple of them and the rest will come around.

It's time to play hardball here.

Let them get their money from the Repubs. That's who they support.

If you buy into their crap, anyone to the right of Adolf Hitler is a commin/leftie/socialist. They don't do "centrist." The farther right they drift, the more people get corralled into their version of what a leftie is.

Wonder why they can't win as Repubs??