A good Man, Wrong Party?

The primary season for this year’s mid-term elections has shown something that is a problem in American politics. In American politics only the loud lots who occupy the extreme wings of our spectrum tend to find any traction with the electorate. I stress the electorate and not the people, because it seems so few of us give a damn. Monumental consequences occur due to the involvement and voting of such a relatively few people. Yet take the primaries for the senate for both parties in the Northeastern United States. Joseph Lieberman was his party’s Vice Presidential candidate in 2000, but his conservatism got him upstaged by a dot com millionaire with some creepy commercials because he was anti-Iraq war. Yet Lieberman’s votes on taxes, judges, and a host of other big-ticket items make him a value to the party in the Senate for all practical purposes. Lincoln Chaffee almost lost re-nomination to a dedicated conservative in Rhode Island because he was not sufficiently lockstep in his dedication to the Republican Party. For the national Republican Party it was a godsend that he did win though, because most polls showed the conservative challenger would have lost in a trouncing to the Democratic candidate. The Republicans are supporting a Democrat in Connecticut so what would stop them hear right? Yet the point that both Democrats and Republicans miss is that these two men were practical centrists. Centrists who engage in compromise build American greatness. Republicans put aside differences to win World War II and banish the dark days of Nixon, and Democrats fought communists and passed tax cuts across the aisle, all for the good of the American people. Against our interests the parties have worked against their particular boogiemen for the last 12 years and we have suffered. Chaffee and Lieberman are not going to be the poster boy’s for either party, but their moderation is just what we should be looking for this November. We can find plenty of Bill Frist’s and Ted Kennedy’s to go around up there.