From the Urban Dictionary:
uncentered isn’t defined yet, but these are close:
kittywampus
crazy word from south-western wisconsin meaning-off-balanced, uncentered, or a general state of confusion.
cokee
Trinidadian term meaning messed up or uncentered.
For well over a decade pundits and others have lamented the “disappearing political center … the shrinking middle.” The Democratic base has moved left, pulling the party with it, so the lament goes, while the Republican base has pulled its party to the right. The American political system thus resembles a barbell, with huge, bulbous weights on either end held together, if at all, by a stretched, thin noodle.
Although this description is no doubt true, at least up to a point, I believe it obscures more than it illuminates. The trouble with “the center” is the same trouble Gertrude Stein famously found with her hometown, Oakland: “Oakland? There’s no there there.” The “center,” in short, has no core, no center; it is defined entirely by its equi-distance between two things it’s not. And since left and right are not fixed, static identities but are always pulling against each other in a never-ending tug of war, with first one side and then the other getting the upper, stronger hand, the center moves left and right depending on the strength of those on either end of its rope.
Thus those “moderate” politicians always in search of the center are always searching for a moving target. Take Maine’s ostensibly Republican Senator, Olympia Snowe (please, take her). As Jay Cost wrote yesterday on RealClearPolitics,
Snowe is one of those senators who can almost always be counted on to find the political center in the Senate, wherever it may be in real terms, because that is where the action is.
Olympia Snowe, the Sandra Day O’Connor of the Senate. But I digress.
The substantive emptiness of the center is bad enough, but the real problem we have now is far worse than that. The real problem is that the great preponderance of elected Democrats have decided to follow Obama out to the left flank of American politics, with not a few of them even trying to push him farther left. As a result, a great gulf has opened up between the center of the Congress and the center of the country as a whole. Washington’s center is not the country’s center. Far from it.
60% or more of the members of Congress (both houses) support the sort of health care reform proposed by Obama and supported by nearly all Congressional Democrats, but Rasmussen finds that only 44% of the public does (and “[j]ust 30% of U.S. voters now think President Obama is governing in a bipartisan fashion”). Moreover, the intensity of those views is even more skewed: “Currently, 23% Strongly Favor the legislative effort and 39% are Strongly Opposed.”
I don’t fault Sen. Snowe for searching for the center, but since she’s looking for it in the wrong place what she’s finding is not in the real center at all.
