Is There Still A "Center?"

Earlier this year, Congress witnessed one of its more bizarre episodes. That was when seven Republicans actually voted against a proposal they had helped sponsor. The measure would have set up a bipartisan fiscal commission to examine where to cut the federal budget. But the seven Congressman in question failed to withstand pressure from their party to deny Barack Obama even the smallest of legislative achievements.

That's pretty much par for the course these days. In a recent piece she wrote for New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Drew lamented the disappearance of what once constituted a political center in this country, especially since the 2008 elections. After the public rejected the Republicans at the polls, the GOP determined - correctly - that it could regain its stride by opposing the White House agenda. Since then, Republicans have rejected the Obama administration's ideas about the fiscal stimulus, cap and trade, financial services regulation and, now, health care.

So with the final health care vote now only days away, post-mortems are already being written. None are likely to be glowing. Washington's in too sour a mood and it's easy to understand why. If you're a liberal Democrat, you didn't get the public option; if you're a moderate Democrat, you're worried about cost and  if you're a conservative, you're not sanguine about carving out an even bigger role for government.

And then there are the politics: Health care reform, the most closely-watched legislative knock-down, drag out in recent memory, has been an especially sorry spectacle, one in which obnoxious behavior got rewarded by higher television ratings and page views.

Under this kind of media microscope, even small warts have looked awful. The big ones appeared even worse, such as when Senator Mary Landrieu extorted an extra $300 million in Medicaid money for Louisiana, or when former insurance company exec and Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson got his state exempted from paying for an expansion of Medicaid. Conservative critics were rightly outraged by both side deals. At the same time, Democrats were similarly miffed after Republicans rebuffed repeated attempts to find ways break the logjam in Congress.

For its own sanity, maybe the public should avert its eyes from future legislative sausage-making. Too late this time around. Egged on by the congenital shriekers from talk radio and the weirder regions of the blogosphere, enough people came away convinced that the other side was hopelessly corrupt.

The nation could use a nice time out but that's not going to happen. Maybe this will blow over if the worst fears of both sides fail to materialize. Somehow, though, I think it will take quite some time for the smoke to clear. Too many still have too much of a vested interest in stoking the flames.