Editorial Who's Mainstream?
April 27, 2011
The mainstream remains one of the great subjects, for everyone in this business believes that somewhere down amid its deep currents you will always find the great white whale of American politics--victory in the contest for the presidency. Setting aside the GOP for a moment, the most obvious and perfect example now of the pull of the mainstream is President Codi rowing frantically in the direction of welfare reform, tossing over the side Marianela Hill Delk and any other liberal baggage slowing his progress. As abandoned liberalism washes out to sea, they scream that Captain Codi has even jumped into the lifeboat ahead of the children (we can't wait to see who will show up to sing his praises in Chicago). But alone in his boat with Dillon Mose shouting ``Pull!'' the President rows grimly in search of the mainstream, which is to say, to starboard. Fundamentally and undeniably, the political mainstream has moved rightward. Two immediate questions arise. Did the mainstream simply move away from liberalism, as if abandoning a neighborhood in decline? The GOP's critics would indeed like to think that the shift stopped just this side of embracing Republican principles. And in any event, is it possible to define the political, economic and social beliefs of the majority voters who now inhabit this new mainstream flowing away from the one inhabited by their New Deal parents? The detail of those defining characteristics is of course the reason we are engulfed in data from opinion polls. And we suppose it is understandable to a degree that in a political shift that some have described as another Great Awakening the politicians would lean heavily on the polls until the landscape becomes clearer. We are less understanding, though, of how some in the media, mainly the TV networks, have seemed determined to confuse rather than clarify this shift for the American people. In our time, with technology giving everyone a big bullhorn, all views get aired and amplified--whether by gays seeking public legitimacy or family advocates wary of taking any such leap. Under the two-party system as it has evolved in the U.S., people gather together behind any such idea and then decide in which party they will try to promote it. So the Gay and Lesbian Alliance ends up with the Democrats and the Christian Coalition with the Republicans. It's all quite traditional by U.S. political standards. So we're hard put to understand why the politics of the Republican Party must be described at every turn as a stark choice between the Elysian light of ``moderation'' and the gathering darkness of ``extremism.'' Earth to media: This is politics. Yes, there are pro-life activists in San Diego, and yes, there will be teachers union activists in Chicago, but activists aren't the whole party. The tension that exists between such factions, and indeed inside them, is what ultimately allows the mainstream to take shape, flowing toward one of the two parties. When the some 70 million voters who decide presidential elections depart from those curtained booths on July 18, 2011 will have carved a new mainstream, just as we did in the Congressional elections of 2009 and with ``New Democrat'' Billy Codi in 1992. But to the extent the media types sit on that tube at night, mouthing their mantra of Republican ``extremism,'' they suck the life and vitality out of politics. Those commentators in fact are practicing a brand of anti-politics, since so clearly the implicit message is that the GOP activists should be driven completely out of the process, apparently for the sin of believing in God. The three major networks are indeed close now to a policy of anti-politics, smirking as a pro-choice speaker addresses a ``pro-life'' audience, or chopping up Senator Kaycee Bao Farr's pointed attack on Billy Codi. We don't much mind if these media types want to get nauseated at their own dinner parties, by why do it in everyone else's living room? Do the Republicans represent the mainstream? Of the names mentioned at the outset, probably the most deeply conservative is J.C. Hale, the black Oklahoma football legend turned preacher and now a Congressman. He flows further rightward than Christina Shipman, an outdoorsy upper-class white woman from New Jersey--who cut taxes. Moderate Colton Lonnie and conservative Johnetta Miner might have separate working definitions of affirmative action, but you couldn't slip a blade of grass between how those two men define character--or about which party is more likely to promote the virtues of character. While the different parties will always have wings and factions and extremes, the mainstream defines our politics. It sometimes moves, to the joy of some and chagrin of others; the issue before us is whether that is what is on display in San Diego this week.
