Tom Friedman wants “a tea party of the radical center.”
He starts by saying the current political system is broken, then defines the term:
“…My definition of broken is simple. It is a system in which Republicans will be voted out for doing the right thing (raising taxes when needed) and Democrats will be voted out for doing the right thing (cutting services when needed). When your political system punishes lawmakers for doing the right things, it is broken. That is why we need political innovation that takes America’s disempowered radical center and enables it to act in proportion to its true size, unconstrained by the two parties, interest groups and orthodoxies that have tied our politics in knots.”
Friedman, author and New York Times columnist, believes that independents and centrists represent a majority of the American people and would embrace such changes as:
— Raising taxes to bring budget deficits down while financing the essential purposes of government.
— Immigration reform.
— Increasing tax credits for corporate research while lowering corporate taxes for companies that move more manufacturing jobs back onshore.
— Increasing spending on education while raising education standards.
— Investing in clean energy while increasing off-shore drilling. (The column was written days before President Obama announced he will authorize more drilling for oil and gas off the east shore of the U.S.)
HOW WOULD he get from here to there?
First, take the power to design political districts away from legislatures and give it to independent citizen boards in-structed to create politically neutral legislative districts rather than those that guarantee the election of a Republican or a Democrat. Then go to an alternative voting system such as Australia uses. In alternative voting a voter may make a first and second choice. That allows a voter to first choose an independent or a third party candidate then name a second choice, which prevails if the first choice fails of election. Alternative voting allows voters to pick an independent without fearing that doing so will help a party he or she opposes.
Another scholar advocates abandoning political primaries because they result in the election of candidates favor-ed by extremists, another facet of the same problem.
FRIEDMAN’S analysis fits the Kansas political scene like a skin-tight glove.
There is no room today in the state Republican Party for a moderate, or, as he calls them, a centrist. As is currently being demonstrated, Re-publicans in the Kansas House must kowtow to “no tax increase” dogma or find themselves without a voice. Republican leaders in the Senate say they will accept a tax increase, but no package of revenue raisers has been put together that has the votes to pass.
The national party is hogtied to the same or-thodoxy, so, despite the advice of such stalwart conservatives as Bob Dole of Kansas and Howard Baker of Tennessee, not a single Republican in the House or Senate supported the health care reform bill. Capture of the party by the radical right was made clear by Sen. John McCain who declared that passage of the health care bill meant that his party would not work with the president on major legislation for the rest of the year — that Republicans would continue to vote no reflexively, apparently without reference to the content of whatever measure might come before them.
Friedman is right. The system is broken.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
