So we finally got word that Americans Elect, the centrist political party that wasn’t a political party threw in the towel after failing to attract a candidate run against the two major party candidates.

Color me not surprised.

The endeavor attracted a lot of news coverage and had a lot of big names (former politicos) supporting it, but the premise of trying to build a centrist political movement all on the internet failed.

Ross Douthat, writing for the New York Time’s Campaign Stops column wrote that part of the problem with the golden unicorn that is a centrist third party is that it tends to be too insiderish, made up of the ruling establishment of both parties:

The founders of Americans Elect, like the Unity ‘08ers before them, clearly pined for a candidate in the mold of New York’s billionaire mayor: A center-left technocrat, more hawkish on deficits and pro-business than the average Democrat, but more socially liberal and less taxophobic than the average Republican. Such a candidate’s platform would presumably amalgamate various unsuccessful bipartisan forays from the last ten years: The Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction plan, comprehensive immigration reform and tax reform, the cap-and-trade program that John McCain once backed and then abandoned, and so on.

Some of these ideas are good ones; some are not. But all of them have much more purchase among elites and insiders and power brokers in the Wall Street-Washington corridor than they do among the kinds of disaffected voters who usually propel third party campaigns, and give them their populist, anti-establishment edge.

Unlike Douthat, I do think a more centrist party could emerge as a force in American politics.  I just don’t happen to think it’s going to happen by creating a dazzling website and hoping the best candidate drops out of the sky from heaven.

Even in this age of Facebook and Twitter, political action is still very much a grassroots affair.  All you have to do is look at how the 2008 Obama campaign or the Tea Party to see that politics is inspired from the bottom up, not top-down, which is what Americans Elect was trying to do.

If a real centrist party is to emerge, it has to do a few things:

Be known for a few issues.  If I say “Tea Party” most folks could tell me what they are all about, which is less government and less spending.  If I say”Occupy Wall Street” you would say something about raising taxes on the richest one percent.  If I saw “Americans Elect” you’d say…what?  I really didn’t know what they stood for except that they didn’t like all the fighting and wanted people to play nice.  Civility and bipartisanship are good things, but they don’t make a political movement.  The far left parties that won in Greece placed their focus on being against austerity and gave people a reason to care.  Any centrist movement here has to do the same thing, give people a reason to want to support them.  It could be on the deficit or the environment or what have you, but it needs to propel people get engaged.  Americans Elect was basically getting people to hit the “like” button ala Facebook.

The Internet is a Tool, not magic. Unity’08 and Americans Elect had this kooky premise that the power of the internet would choose a candidate.  There is a sort of odd magical thinking among centrists when it comes to the internet.  As noted in Tech President a few days ago, it’s the Field of Dreams Fallacy, if you build a political campaign, they will come.

The Field of Dreams Fallacy (“if you build it, they will come”) plagues all sorts of expensive, half-baked projects in online politics. A few years ago, dozens of interest groups looked at the success of social networking sites like Facebook and became convinced that they should launch their own, branded social networks. Millions of dollars later, it turned out that they were all building virtual ghost towns. Technology alone doesn’t create political communities. If your members are already happily on Facebook, they’re unlikely to divert that time and spend it on a Sierra Club- or NRA-specific social network instead. The real successes in online politics comes at the intersection of motivated communities-of-interest and supportive technological platforms. (emphsis mine)

Americans Elect was founded on the gimmicky premise that the power of the Internet would “break the gridlock of Washington” by letting online citizens vote in their own non-party primary. Set aside the obvious flaws in that premise (putting a candidate on the ballot does not elect them to office. Electing a president doesn’t remove the gridlock-inducing Senate filibuster.). An awful lot of citizens already vote in primaries — Mitt Romney has received over 5 million votes in the Republican primaries, and he’s constantly criticized for being unpopular. In a country of 311 million mostly-disaffected citizens, one can certainly make that case. The promise of Americans Elect is that the Internet be a bridge to involvement for the rest of us.

And we see how that turned out.

Internet sensations like the 2008 Obama Campaign were successful because they connected the already motivated to an electronic platform.  In the case of Americans Elect, the medium was the message or no message and it failed.

Politics is about connections.  The thing that makes political movements successful is getting a bunch of like-minded passionate people together and organizing them into a cohesive group.  Politics is really a communal practice, where individuals come together to form groups based on certain shared issue.  Americans Elect was where individuals came and…were still individuals.  There was no group formation (which generally happens offline).  Americans Elect is a new age kind of thing that is centered around the idea that politics can be a solo affair.  But for any movement to get anywhere, it needs some buy-in, someway to take individuals and make them part of a larger group.

So, not that Americans Elect is history, there is already talk about 2016.  So I leave wide-eyed centrists with a lot of money with this advice:

If you want to have a viable centrist party, do it the old-fashioned way: find a charismatic candidate.  Focus on a few things.  Give up the idol of bipartisanship and be more about ideas.  Get your nose out your laptops and set up discussion groups in coffeeshops around the nation.  Study the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street to find out how movements really act.  Look at how other centrist parties around the world operate.

But please, for the love of God, don’t spend millions on a fancy website and slick PR to promote a miracle that will never happen.  What that shows is that centrists are a joke and not serious.

Comedian S.E. Cupp doesn’t think so:

Wouldn’t it have been more courageous if Obama had evolved a bit before the North Carolina vote, not after? And wouldn’t it have been more sincere and meaningful if his revelation weren’t so obviously connected to his reelection and fund-raising efforts?

Or if it weren’t prompted by a gaffe from the gaffe-prone Vice President Biden, who had declared on “Meet the Press” that he was “absolutely comfortable” with gay marriage, thus forcing the President’s hand.

Considering the timing and the political implications, it’s clear that Obama’s message to gay America wasn’t so much “I love you” as it was “I’m okay with you and want your vote.” It was the equivalent of hitting the “like” button on a Facebook page.

The news this week of President Obama finally “coming out of the closet” on same sex marriage seemed to frame the issue in very stark, partisan terms: Democrats good, Republicans bad.  It didn’t help that GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney fired back with his opposition to gay marriage.

The GOP is not where the Dems are on this issue.  You can’t try to dress up that pig.  But it’s also important to remember that there is a slow, but building movement of folks in the GOP who support gay marriage.  And it’s also important to remember that one GOP Senator was instrumental in allowing gays to serve openly in the military.

Change can come slowly, but change does happen.  It may seem pointless at times, but I think one day in the very near future, there will be a GOP candidate for president who will voice support for same sex marriage and no one will bat an eye.

Is that a silly thing to believe?  Stranger things have happened- like a President actually coming out in favor of same sex marriage.

Pejman Yousefzadeh, offers words of praise for the defeated GOP Senator:

Let it be conceded–as though it has to be–that Dick Lugar never had any particular right to be re-nominated to another term in the United States Senate by Indiana’s Republican voters. Let it also be conceded–as though it has to be–that Richard Mourdock had every right to run against him, and won fair and square. He simply ran the better campaign, and 2012 simply wasn’t Dick Lugar’s year.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that I was ever in favor of targeting Lugar for defeat. In fact, quite the contrary; I had hoped that he would be able to prevail over Mourdock. Lugar is a highly experienced senator in the best sense of the term. He is a responsible and thoughtful legislator, he understands that in order to get things done in Congress–and yes, sometimes one ought to want to get things done in Congress–one has to be prepared to deal with the other side of the aisle, and he has tremendous expertise when it comes to foreign affairs, and national security.

He wasn’t the most conservative senator around, but he was no liberal, and could scarcely be called a moderate. Ronald Reagan used to say that the person who agreed with him 4 times out of 5 was an 80% friend, not a 20% enemy. Dick Lugar may not have reached 80%, but being a nearly 70% friend is not half bad, and is little cause for an insurrection.

 

Meanwhile Tom Van Dyke saw good riddance to man who consorted with Democrats:

Want to blame Republicans for spending like drunken Kennedys during the GWB era? Dick Lugar’s your man, what was wrong with the GOP, except he’s a “moderate,” so he gets a pass.

No longer, though. If the GOP is going to win elections, it’s going to win them fair and square with real Republicans, not fake ones.

Mebbe it was Sen. Lugar’s fronting for the execrable “Law of the Sea ” treaty that reduces the United Steezy into just another arm of the Euroweinie enviro-diplomatic complex. My jingoistic self is thoroughly appalled. I wouldn’t give you two cents for the rest of the world combined over the United States of America.

So call me pisher.

In any case, the 80-yr-old Sen. Lugar’s brand of Republicanism has had its day, where any “moderation” is a demerit on the GOP record and any guts are proof of the GOP’s “extremism.”

It’s not win-win mugwumpery, it’s a lose-lose Rockefeller Republicanism where the critics nail the GOP either way, coming or going.

If the GOP is to reform, and it must—it got no credit for GWB’s Democrat-lite “compassionate conservatism”—it’s to be as the adult alternative to Barack Obama’s “Audacity of Hope” and Dick Lugar’s Audacity of Professional Politicianism, where there’s little difference between Pin the Tail on the Donkey and Find the Elephant in the Room.

Myself, I would echo Pejman.  While I think Lugar stayed way past his time, he represented a gentlemanly conservatism that was resolutely Republican, but willing to deal with the other side in order to get things done.

As for Van Dyke’s too-cute-by half post mocking Lugar; well, one wonders how much a real Republican you have to be to get his approval.  Lugar was never really considered a Rockefeller Republican like many of the Northeastern Republicans, so his painting Lugar as one is a sign of how far the goal posts have moved in considering who is a Republican and who is not.

Richard Murdock may well make a good Senator, standing up for conservative values.  But part of being a politician is to be able to govern as well.  Will Murdock be able to work with Democrats when the need arises?  We shall see.

If you’ve been following this blog over the last year or two, then you’ve noticed my growing discontent with the centrist movement.  Even though I still see my own views as somewhat centrist, I think there are some drawbacks with ideas like No Labels and Americans Elect.  I could never put my own wariness into words, but now Walter Russell Mead has done so.  In his latest essay called “Americans Elect: The Broccoli Party Is Born” he opines about how it has not lived up to expectations.  He basically says that in tumultous times like the one we find ourselves in, people don’t want city managers for politicians:

Americans Elect represents a classic form of American political futility: the genteel, sensible and civilized revolt of the upper middle class. Americans Elect is the latest incarnation of the always thoughtful but rarely successful Broccoli Party, the movement of those who think we should start living rationally and moderately.

Generally speaking, these noble civic endeavors start out impressively and then stall. A few mayors get elected, a few people make some eloquent and heartfelt addresses. Much logic is displayed; few ballots are cast. So far, Americans Elect seems to be traveling that well trodden path toward irrelevance.

The American two party system is mostly a contest between the Pie Party and the Ice Cream Party. Each offers a mix of attractive, somewhat demagogic appeals to the magical thinking, inner ten-year-old that lives inside most of us American voters. Politicians tell us how we can get what we want — and why we deserve it. You name your desired treat — big spending, low taxes, social issues, earmarks — and politicians will offer to help you get it.

Voters complain about the insincerity and phoniness of politicians, but they still want dessert. When voters talk about bipartisan, centrist solutions, they are thinking about having some ice cream on top of their pie, not about giving up both treats in favor of some nice wholesome veg.

Now, I happen to like broccoli, but I also happen to like ice cream and pie as well.  People might say they want rational, moderate pols, but in reality, we want someone who is going to get our motors running and our hearts beating.  The reason that Obama was so successful in 2008 was not because he proposed pragmatic policies, it was because he offered an almost messianic hope to people.

That’s not to say there isn’t a place for bland politicians.  The postwar era, which centrists like myself tend to look at with some fondness, was just such an era.  But as the postwar consensus started breaking down, we started to see the rise of more ideological pols.  The reason GOP stalwarts like Dick Lugar and Orin Hatch are being challenged is not as much as some kind of “hijacking” from the far right as it is a changing of the electorate.  The voting public doesn’t want pols who get things done, they want people who offer pie or ice cream. Mead notes we need more “Daniel Boones” in this era of change:

…our contemporary Mugwumps are wrong, I think, when they think that the solutions to our problems are all known, and that it is just a question of reason and willpower. America is at the end of one road — the way of the blue social model — and we are at the frontier of history, confronting problems that no large society has ever faced before. How to maintain a mass middle class when both manufacturing and white collar work faces challenges from automation and outsourcing; how to maintain large and expensive old age programs when demography shifts and population growth slows; how to provide dramatically greater quantities of health care and educational services when these sectors are low-productivity and costs are exploding: the answers to these questions aren’t in the old good governance textbooks.

We need Daniel Boones, these days, as we step uneasily into unknown terrain, rather than earnest city managers who want to run everything by the book. The latter have their place, and when the new frontier is settled and new cities and institutions arise, they will need to be managed by competent and honest people. But until that time, we are not in a Golden Age of Mugwumpery. In the dog eat dog politics of 2012, Americans Elect is barking up the wrong tree.

Frankly, what I would like to see from my fellow Mugwumps is less of things like Americans Elect and more of producing innovative ideas to address the changing era we live in.

Ross Douthat lends his voice to the recent firing of conservative writer John Derbyshire from the National Review for a racist article.  He approves of the firing and the offers this take on racism as a counter to a point made by Conor Friedersdorf:

This future is unlikely to be as ugly as the past, because the case for formal segregation and overt racial discrimination isn’t going to come back. Nor, as I’ve said before, do I think that race is going to be the controlling cleavage of 21st century America: Already, I think religion, political ideology and social class can trump the color line as a source of polarization and division, and I expect that pattern to continue.

But I can think of a half-dozen reasons why public expressions of race-based hostility (of all sorts, not just against African Americans) might become more common, not less, as the America of the Boomers gives way to the America of the millennials. These reasons include the Internet’s tendency to make the taboo not-so-taboo anymore, our growing chronological distance from the institutional injustices whose successful overthrow made racism taboo in the first place, our culture’s obsession with genetic theories of just about everything, the fracturing of the Christian common ground that undergirded at least some of the belief in human equality, the way that diversity seems to increase social mistrust, the social gulf that increasingly yawns between upper-class whites who are invested in a multiracial society and lower-class whites who feel like losers in it, the potential growth of a grievance-based white identity politics as America becomes majority-minority, and the fact that white guilt over slavery and segregation — the foundation of the anti-racist consensus at the moment — will necessarily be a weaker cultural force in a country that’s more Hispanic, more Asian, and more non-white in general.

 

It kind of gets to a point that I’ve been thinking about for a while: racism will in some form or another always be with us.  It’s not because America is somehow fundamentally more racist than other spots on the globe.  I think for a variety of reasons-from increasing diversity to the stagnation of the lower white middle class and the isolation of the black underclass- racism will continue to be a problem in American society.  We aren’t going back to Jim Crow, but I think economic and social forces will bring rhetoric like Derbyshire’s out into the open.

There’s a lot of talk—much of it inaccurate—about the minority of conservatives who supported the individual mandate in the past, but oppose Obamacare’s requirement that all Americans buy health insurance. But these critics have devoted less attention to the fact that many liberals—including President Obama—opposed the individual mandate in the past. “The liberals hated it,” notes Jonathan Gruber in a recent New York Times profile. “People forget that.”

It’s been one of the swiftest shifts in ideology and strategy for Republicans, as they’ve come nearly full circle on same-sex politics. What was once a front-and-center issue for rank-and-file Republicans — the subject of many hotly worded House and Senate floor speeches — is virtually a dead issue, as Republicans in Congress don’t care to have gay marriage litigated in the Capitol. Even more than that, Republican leadership has evolved, too. It has quietly worked behind the scenes to kill amendments that reaffirm opposition to same-sex unions, several sources told POLITICO. It’s not like the GOP has become a bastion of progressiveness on gay rights, but there has been an evolution in the political approach — and an acknowledgment of a cultural shift in the country. Same-sex relationships are more prominent and accepted. There are more gay public figures — including politicians — and it’s likely that many Washington Republicans have gay friends and coworkers. Just as important — there’s also a libertarian streak of acceptance on people’s sexuality coursing through the House Republican Conference.

Mike Dwyer:

Last summer I happened to look out the front window of my house just a little after dark and saw a car at the end of my street. The car was driving in slow circles and obviously looked a little suspicious. After five minutes of this the car stopped circling and drove slowly back down my street and then parked in the middle of the median, headlights shining on my neighbor’s house. At this point I decided to go outside and watch a little more closely. I went to the bedroom and grabbed the phone, a flashlight and my pistol. Then I sat on the front porch and waited. After about 10 minutes of observing, my neighbor’s daughter came out of the house, jumped in the car and they left. The driver, probably in his mid-teens, was just waiting for his girlfriend and acting like a jackass with his car. He was also black.

Tod Kelly’s post about the Travon Martin saw some traffic this weekend and the conversation still continues. I wanted to relate these stories to share one person’s perspective on the matter. What I recognize now is that in both cases I was only one or two bad decisions away from finding myself in the same situation as the shooter in the Martin case.