Robert Kuttner<...>
The latest incarnation of the bipartisan delusion is an organization calling itself "No Labels." This is not an anti-designer consumer protest, but a political organization advertising the conceit that there is something virtuous per se about being post-partisan, never mind the content.
No Labels, according to the
Wall Street Journal,
has raised more than $1 million to seed its effort against what it calls "hyper-partisanship." Backers include co-chairman of Loews Corp. Andrew Tisch, Panera Bread founder Ron Shaich and ex-Facebook executive Dave Morin. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, as well as U.S. senators Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Michigan's Debbie Stabenow, will attend the New York launch.
The group's goal is to start a centrist equivalent to the tea-party movement on the right and MoveOn on the left. It sees an opportunity based on the defeat of liberal Republicans in recent years and the heavy losses taken by conservative Democrats in 2010.
'I've never seen such a wide opening for a third force in American politics,' says William Galston, a Brookings Institution fellow and No Labels adviser.
Spare me! Is Joe Lieberman, one of the great hacks of American politics, anybody's idea of a fresh thinker?
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What are Debbie Stabenow and Antonio Villaraigosa, of all people, doing associating themselves with this crowd? Didn't partisan Democrats and the labor movement work their tails off to get these people elected?
One of the two organizers of the effort is Nancy Jacobson, a big-time Democratic fund-raiser who is married to strategist Mark Penn, the pollster who invariably advises Democrats to move to the right. You can guess who will get the contract if this outfit takes off.
According to several reports, the fantasy of this group is that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg would agree to run as a centrist independent in 2012.
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Seriously, what the hell does all this mean? A centrist tea party?
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