The smoke has cleared; only the maimed and the dead remain on the battlefield. They are, for the most part, Democrats. The job of carting them off will take weeks; the post-mortems will take even longer. And yet progressives — we with our fetish for soul-searching — should reject a new, indulgent round of autocritique, or at least recognize that there is only so much to reflect on. The electorate’s rejection of Democrats is a lot of things, but a referendum on the quality of our ideas it isn’t.

How can that be? Isn’t a rebuke of this magnitude by definition a rejection of a party’s ideas? Well, it is if the ideas were carefully inspected and considered by an informed electorate. But sobriety has been hard to come by this election season. And what we tend to forget is that, before our discourse got sucked into the Fox-powered Tea Party vortex, our ideas were actually popular across the spectrum. Far from dogmatic and divisive, the policies that progressives have pushed in recent years have been sane, sensible fixes that have drawn support from left, right, and center.

Take cap-and-trade. Only the truly delusional still think that climate change and our voracious consumption of fossil-based fuels are nothing to worry about. Cap-and-trade was an innovative solution to the problem, harnessing the market — and eschewing command-and-control regulation — to bring about a reduction in carbon emissions.

Or take health care reform. Despite cries from left and right, the Obama administration got reform generally correct, setting us on a path to cutting costs and increasing access, all while leaving a system that Americans had grown accustomed to intact.

Or infrastructure. Economists of all stripes believe that we need more stimulus to spur economic activity. Every American who uses our roads, bridges, and water supply knows that our infrastructure is crumbling. In light of those needs, President Obama pushed through billions in infrastructure spending and just recently proposed a new $50 billion infrastructure bill.

All of these are good ideas that have achieved a certain degree of consensus, or at least support from moderates. An original version of cap-and-trade was co-sponsored by John McCain and was backed by moderate Republicans in the prelapsarian days before the Tea Party’s rousing. Health-care reform: As Jonathan Cohn noted, “Obama’s plan closely mirrors three proposals that have attracted the support of Republicans who reside within the party’s mainstream” — the most prominent of whom is Mitt Romney, whose health-care legislation in Massachusetts is a fairly close sibling of the national reform passed this year. As for infrastructure, money for more spending on the nation’s backbone was supported by Republican senators like Kit Bond and George Voinovich (both retiring – no coincidence) in an earlier jobs bill vote.

In all these cases, an urgent public problem was identified, and sensible, pragmatic solutions were proposed. But we no longer have politics that can accommodate the sensible and the pragmatic. The same John McCain who co-sponsored cap-and-trade now rails against it. Romney and Republicans who supported previous iterations of the Obama health plan have nothing but calumny for reform. Meanwhile, the only news of conservatives dealing with infrastructure is when they shrink from the challenge, like Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey backing away from a proposed, and badly needed, tunnel to New York.

Over and over again, progressives have come up with solutions to our problems that can be embraced by the moderate middle. But in these last two years, we’ve seen that no matter how good and moderate the ideas are, it doesn’t seem to matter.

In this dilemma lies the priority for the pragmatic progressive in these next two years. The fact is our ideas are good. They are sound. Progressives of the Obama era have brought an innovative, reformist sensibility to government that prizes empiricism and problem-solving above all. Yet the party across the table has pulled back and shown little interest in engaging. They want us to keep coming to the table with more concessions — while hardly offering any concessions of their own. If we keep whittling down our ideas to meet their whims, our ideas will be hardly worth enacting at all.

We must, of course, never slow our indefatigable search for new ideas – it is what defines progressivism. But the paramount challenge, for these next two years at any rate, is finding a new politics. The calls for a new radical center are all well and good, but we need to remember that that’s where our ideas already are. It’s the right that has abandoned that center. The consensus ideas of yesterday have become the Marxist plots of their 2010 campaign. And sensible ideas have little chance of growing in political soil parched of sense. Will the part of the conservative movement that still cares about fiscal responsibility, fact-based argument, and good-faith dialogue resurface? Will they make their voices heard against the know-nothings and the ideologues who have taken over their party?

No doubt progressives should continue to be on the lookout for all who are sober and serious about solving our nation’s problems. Challenges must be issued and coalitions of the willing must be sought. But we shouldn’t allow the emergent faction of hysteria and irresponsibility to sway us from a core conviction: that when one already occupies the reasonable center, standing one’s ground is the reasonable thing to do.

In the next few days, we’re going to be hearing a lot about how the Democrats lost “independents,” who, after breaking for Democrats in both 2006 and 2008, broke hard this time for Republicans, and for the third straight cycle, voted against the party in power.

And while it’s clear that “independents”, who now make up 37 percent of the electorate (as compared to 34 percent for registered Democrats and 29 percent for registered Republicans) hold the balance of power in American politics, understanding how to win them or even who they are and what they want is less clear.

In short, the best way to win back “independents” is this: Obama and the Dems need a little bit of patience, a lot of attention to pragmatic problem-solving, and the ability to resist the temptation to hunker down and move to the left.

But before getting to details of the political prescriptions, any discussion about the mood independents needs to begin with the observation that “independents” is a much more varied category than almost all pundits make it out to be. Many independents are actually shadow partisans, and a good number even see themselves are too far left or right for the two parties.

According to Gallup, only 43 percent of independents indentify themselves as “moderate,” while 35 percent say they are “conservative “and 18 percent say they are “liberal”. By comparison, 39 percent of Democrats and 24 percent of Republicans identify themselves as “moderate.” In other words, independents are hardly more “moderate” than Democrats.

In a recent survey, Pew broke independents down into five categories: “Shadow Republicans” (26 percent of independents); “Disaffected Republicans” (16 percent); “Shadow Democrats” (21 percent); “Doubting Democrats” (20 percent); and “Disengaged” (17 percent).  As the names suggest, the shadow partisans vote somewhat predictably as partisans, while the Disaffected/Doubting class are slightly less reliably partisan, and the “Disengaged”, while most likely to be true independents, are also the least likely to vote – only 21 percent told Pew they were planning to vote this November.

So one way to think of independents is in terms of various degrees of independence. At the core are the true, true independents, who political scientists estimate to be about 10 percent of the electorate. These tend to be the most disaffected, disengaged voters, and lacking the ideological litmus tests of partisans, they also tend to be the most subject to the atmospherics and moods of how the country is doing and how even their own life is going rather than caring whether so-and-so voted the “right way” on some particular issue.

This probably goes a long way in explaining why they abandoned Democrats. Given the struggling economy, there is a desire to do something different, regardless of whether or not it makes sense  – what Shankar Vedantam recently described as “action bias.” But it also means that they could turn just as quickly against Republicans, as they have in the past.

The lack of ideological attachment also suggests that while vague sloganeering against “big government” may make a good rallying cry, in all likelihood, few of these performance-based voters care all that passionately about the size of government.  Rather, they are latching onto the most available explanation for the current sorry state of affairs. In their gut, they sense something is not working, but don’t have well-formed theories about what, exactly, it is that is not working. And, of course, they’d be hard-pressed to lay out exactly what they’d cut. They are not ideological crusaders. They are just generally cranky.

Expanding to the weak partisans – the so-called “Disaffected Republicans” and “Doubting Dems” – widens the category to bring in both the Republicans who probably dropped from the GOP column in 2006 and 2008 and either voted Dem or stayed home, and the Dems who are presumably crossing over or staying home this time  (only 23 percent of the so-called “Doubting Democrats” told Pew that Obama’s policies have made economic conditions better, as compared to 50 percent for partisan or shadow Democrats).  The weak partisans are more cynical and more anti-politician than their shadow partisan counterparts, and are accordingly probably more susceptible to the “throw the bums out” mood than their shadow partisans, who maintain a more interest in candidate positions and ideology.

Obviously, there is a mood of unusual restlessness in this country. This election marks the first time in almost 60 years that THREE consecutive elections resulted in House pick-ups of 20 or more seats for one party or the other (Dems picked up 31 seats in 2006, and 21 in 2008). One has to go back to 1952, when Republicans picked up 22 seats, marking the then-fifth consecutive House election of 20+ seat swings.

It’s also worth noting that 74 percent of independents now support the idea of a third party, up from 56 percent in 2003, and almost two-thirds (64 percent) of independents think that, “both parties care more about special interests than average Americans.” (Of course, it’s not just independents who want a third party – it’s also 47 percent of registered Republicans and 45 percent of registered Democrats, and overall, 58 percent of Americans who feel the two-party system is not providing adequate representation.)

So how can Democrats win back and re-mobilize these perpetually disaffected and disengaged types who broke for the Democrats in 2006 and 2008, and then either turned Republican in 2010 or just stayed home?

Partially, they just have to be patient and mature, since two big things are likely to happen in the next two years that will benefit them:

1. The economy is likely to improve, and Obama and the Dems should be able to take credit for this if they manage their communications strategy correctly, which will help with the performance-based calculus of these voters.
2. Republicans are likely to over-reach politically and spend too much time blocking administration initiatives, and holding investigations that lead nowhere. This may play well with the base, but it is unlikely to impress the non-ideological independents who are more interested in whether something is being done to help them pay their mortgage or get a job. If Obama and the Dems can offer a problem-solving oriented contrast to the ideological rampage of angry Republicans, they will benefit from looking like the adults in the room, just as they did in the 2008 election.

Will this be enough by itself to win back the sliver of disaffected independents who hold the keys to the balance of power? Maybe so, but maybe not.

To the extent that Obama and the Democrats want to win back the lost independents, they need to do their best to show them that they are reasonable, interested in making government work, and capable of making government work.

There will be great pressure, no doubt, from those who want Obama to draw a clear distinction with Republicans by pushing a more clearly left agenda. While this may excite the 20 percent or so of the electorate who are true liberals, it will all but ensure the kind of partisan gridlock that makes disaffected independents disaffected in the first place, further turning them off from politics (and making base voters even more important, which would be stupid, since the Republican base is bigger).

These swing independents don’t care much about ideology. They don’t pay attention to it, and they don’t vote on it. They care whether things are getting better and whether the folks in Washington look like they are trying to make things work.

There are plenty of sensible, centrist initiatives on important issues like energy, education, taxes, and infrastructure that we at PPI will be exploring over the next several months. We believe these solutions are both good policies and good politics for the same reason – because they are moderate approaches that can work, and in the process show some enough of the disaffected, non-ideological independents that Democrats are the party who is actually serious about governing.

The Republicans’ midterm triumph obviously is a demoralizing blow to President Obama, but it’s also a second chance. Unlike the scores of Democratic lawmakers who lost their seats, he has an opportunity to win back voters in the volatile center whose oscillations are keeping both parties on a short political leash.

How? By reclaiming the “postpartisan” reformer mantle that appealed so powerfully to these voters during his 2008 presidential campaign, and by crafting a more compelling plan to unleash U.S. economic dynamism.

Lest we forget, Obama ran as an outsider who promised to confront the dysfunctional political culture of Washington. While he’s redeemed other key campaign pledges, like ending torture, winding down the Iraq war, and passing comprehensive health care reform, he’s done little to change the way Washington works.

While independents overwhelmingly (by 15 points) backed Republicans, exit polls suggest they didn’t vote for the Tea Party’s radically libertarian philosophy, or for more political gridlock. In fact, they are defined in large part by their hostility to polarization and strident partisanship in Washington, and by their preference for performance over ideology.

Obama can begin to reestablish his standing with these voters by proposing structural fixes to our broken political system. And he can put the anti-government party on the spot by challenging Republicans to join him in reforming, rather than disabling, government.

Don’t mistake this for the familiar argument that Obama should “return to the center.” His challenge is not to reposition himself ideologically, it’s to break an ideological and partisan deadlock that’s paralyzing our government.  For example, Obama could press for the federal clean elections law championed by Sen. Dick Durban that would finance Congressional campaigns with small donations matched by public contributions.  He could try to work out a deal with Republicans to limit filibusters, which may now become a weapon in the hands of Senate Democrats (after all, he still has the veto). Or he could propose a lifetime ban on lobbying by ex-Members of Congress and their staffs.

And yes, fixing a broken political system entails working harder to find common ground with Republicans and restoring a civil tone in Washington, as Obama promised today in his post-election press conference today.  With Republicans firmly in control of the House of Representatives, he doesn’t have any choice but to search for consensus and compromise – not unless he wants to put his presidency on hold for the next two years.

The flip side, of course, is that House Republicans can no longer claim powerlessness as an excuse for indulging in a politics of pure obstructionism.  It’s doubtful they’ll be able to get away with serving up the usual ideological platitudes about limited government and fiscal probity. Now they’ll either have to share responsibility for governing with Obama, or come up with their own ideas for solving the nation’s urgent problems.

That could get ugly, at least at first. Fresh off their big victory, Republicans seem to be brimming with Tea Party hubris. Speaker-in-waiting John Boehner vowed this morning to make repealing “Obamacare” a top priority when the next Congress convenes in January.  It’s tempting to say “bring it on,” because this would be a monumental mistake, an ideological overreach akin to Newt Gingrich’s attempts to shut down the federal government after the 1994 midterm. It would embroil the country again in another deeply divisive cage-match over health care reform, even as independents are yelling “focus on the economy” at the top of their lungs.

By developing a new blueprint to spur economic innovation and entrepreneurship, Obama can seize the political initiative, force Republicans to react to him, and quite possibly highlight significant fissures in GOP ranks. On deficit reduction, tax cuts, education, and immigration reform, Obama faces a similar challenge: bring the debate down from the GOP’s ideological nebulae to the concrete policy choices facing the country.  He needs to keep pressure on the anti-government party to govern.

In the coming duel with House Republicans, Obama holds many high cards. He commands the bully pulpit, and with it, the opportunity to set the political agenda. He can use the veto to temper and force changes in GOP initiatives, as Bill Clinton did in vetoing welfare reform twice before getting a more progressive version. And if they won’t even come out to play, Obama can run against a “do-nothing” Congress just as Harry Truman did in 1948.

As many former presidents could attest, political life is full of second acts. President Obama’s is just beginning.

The Republican Party’s midterm sweep sets up a titanic test of wills between President Obama and the new GOP House majority. In the coming showdown, President Obama will enjoy at least four advantages.

Read the full piece at Politico’s “The Arena”

Political handicappers are so intent on trying to quantify Democratic losses in the midterm elections that they are missing the bigger picture: America’s radical center seems to be in a permanent state of revolt.

Democrats are going to get thrashed tomorrow, just as Republicans incurred huge losses in 2006 and 2008.  The 2010 midterm will likely be the third successive election in which voters – or, more precisely, independent voters – rejected the ruling party. Grasping the significance of this meta-trend is more important that toting up the partisan body count.

Volatility across the broad center of the U.S. electorate has made this the age of the fleeting governing majority. Bill Clinton and the Democrats had one briefly from 1992-1994. Then George W. Bush and the Republicans held undivided power for six years before losing it in 2006.

“That’s never happened before in back-to-back administrations,” notes pollster Scott Rasmussen. The likely return to divided government signals, as Sarah Palin might put it, public “refudiation” of both political parties.

It’s no accident that this trend coincides with the “great sorting out,” the tendency of both parties to gravitate toward their respective ideological poles. This has left a large, discontented body of voters that increasingly feels disenfranchised by the two-party system. More Americans (37 percent) now identify as independents than as Democrats or Republicans.

Of course, independents are a diverse lot. The Pew Research Center, for example, breaks them down into categories (“shadow Republicans” and “doubting Democrats”) that suggest that a significant portion of them have residual partisan leanings. They’ve also grown more conservative since 2006, perhaps owing to GOP defections, and more skeptical of government’s ability to solve big problems.

Compared to core conservatives and liberals, however, independents are generally pragmatic and moderate in outlook, and almost by definition are alienated from the hyper-partisan, zero-sum game of politics as played in Washington.  Above all, says Andy Kohut of the Pew Center, they put performance before ideology. They will vote against incumbents not out of a basic philosophical affinity with the Republicans, but because they believe Democratic policies have failed to spur jobs and economic growth.

In 2006, independents gave Democrats a 17-point margin, and control of Congress. Obama carried independents by 8 points in 2008, enough to give him the biggest majority won by a Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon Johnson. Their defection from the progressive coalition over the past two years is the main reason  Democrats are facing a beat-down tomorrow.

The silver lining for progressives in the midterm is that these swing voters could swing back their way over the next two years.  According to a recent National Journal poll, independents still harbor reasonably warm feelings about President Obama. The key to winning them back is not to be more liberal or more moderate, it’s to govern effectively from the pragmatic center. That means building bipartisan support for tackling the nation’s most urgent problems: stalled job growth, eroding competitiveness, a massive overhang of debt, not to mention a careful winding down our overseas military engagements.

But if Obama and House Republicans can’t find a way to make forward progress on these fronts, the radical center will only become more disenchanted with the two-party duopoly. In that case, watch for a serious push to weld non-aligned and moderate voters into a “third force” in U.S. politics.

Photo credit: Chris

Imagine you are taking a shower. The water is too cold, so you turn it a little to the hot side. But hot turns out to be too hot, so you turn it a little to the cold side. But then cold turns out to be too cold.  So you turn it back a little to the hot side, only for it to be too hot again. But no matter how you adjust, you can’t seem to find that nice comfortable middle temperature.

That seems to be about the dilemma a majority American people face with regard to their representatives in Congress. According to a new analysis of voters and their members of Congress, an estimated 90 percent of voters are less extreme than their elected representatives. Or put another way, only one in ten voters are more extreme then the folks representing them in Washington, DC.

But the problem is these 90 percent voters don’t have centrist candidates to choose from. Instead, they go from electing representatives who are too conservative for them, to electing representatives who are too liberal for them, to too conservative for them, every now and then trying to adjust, but always quite unsucessfully.

The authors of this analysis, Dartmouth political scientists Joseph Bafumi and Michael C. Herron, call this process “leapfrog representation” – since the median voter keeps getting leapfrogged when seats change parties. And what’s more compelling is that according to their analysis, even the median voter within each party is more moderate than the representatives.  (If you want to know more about how they got these results, you can read a more detailed article I wrote about the study, or for the technically inclined, the authors’ academic version.)

One of the other neat things about this study was that the researchers were able to show that voters who also contribute to campaigns tend to be more extreme than those who don’t. Though they don’t have the data to prove this for sure, it does suggest that money may be doing some of the work of driving extremism. If you assume that money is important (a pretty safe assumption), it makes sense that candidates who appeal to extremes can raise more money, which helps them greatly at the early stages of a campaign when money is probably most important.

All of this, of course, makes for pretty depressing reading. It suggests that we are in a period of “leapfrog politics,” in which the moderate, middle-of-the-road voters who make up the majority of the electorate are going to keep switching from too liberal to too conservative, never quite able to find that happy medium ground (like the poor shower-taker switching from too hot to too cold).  But it is a helpful way of understanding what’s going on, and a quite powerful analysis.

Photo credit: Davide Repucci

All the screaming (and some stomping) is coming to an end. Pundit upon pundit has beaten the drum of defeat for the Democratic Party.  John Boehner can measure the drapes, the Tea Party’s here to stay, blah blah blah.

Don’t go sulking just yet, and you heard it here first: Democrats will hold the House.  Let’s take a step back and look at the facts and races that tell the hidden story of this election.

1. Ideas Matter

To state the obvious, the Republicans haven’t offered a single concrete idea, asking voters to forget years of ill-gotten tax cuts and an ill-advised war.  Do they really believe voters are ready to turn over trust to them again so quickly? They have played it safe and will take the anger vote and hope it gives them a majority. The public isn’t buying it—the Republican brand stands at just 23 percent approval

Many swing voters focus on the election over the weekend and realize that Democrats told the country what they would do two years ago and then did it—healthcare, stimulus, and financial regulation reform.

Some of these ideas might be more long-ball (e.g., healthcare) but Democrats will get more credit than you’d think for ideas and leadership.  That’s why I’m betting that late-deciding voters will either break slightly to the Democrats or just stay home.

2. Campaigns matter

 

It might seem like every Democrat in the country is down 50 percent in the polls. The truth is that most all of these races will come down to one-to-four percent and that in the end, the actual hard work of grassroots fighting for the last vote is very much in favor of Democrats.

When I was at the DCCC in 1994, I was all too aware that Democrats lost 52 House seats by a grand total of 18,000 votes (not the overall vote but the difference in seats lost).  Those votes are turned by a campaign ground game, and the Republicans don’t have a good one, thanks to the incredibly poor leadership of Michael Steele at the RNC.  The DNC is pouring its all into GOTV efforts of this final stretch.  When you look at the latest polls and see 10-to-12 percent undecided vote, it is most likely those voters will never show up at this point.

3. Seat by Seat

The “Pundit Consensus” is a 55-seat gain by Republicans, which would give them a 16-seat majority in the House.  But if we examine those races on a case-by-case basis, the details indicate Republicans only stand to gain 35 seats, or four shy of a majority.

The top list of Democratic holds that all show up as losses currently.

Let’s start with 55 seats and work our way backwards:

New York

Three candidates on top of the ticket running 20-30 percent ahead of flawed Republican Senate candidates.  Are we going to see vote splitting at the 25 percent level? That just doesn’t add up.  The Republican Party in New York is in complete disarray and that will affect turnout in the closing days.

Take away at least the following pickups:

Owens  -3^rd party candidate getting between 5-15 percent of the vote

Murphy

Hall

Pickup now stands at 52.

Pennsylvania

Democratic well-oiled turnout machine will be prepared to do battle and hold:

Murphy

Kanjorski

Carney

Pickups now stand at 49.

New Hampshire

It’s doubtful that voters will return Charlie Bass to Congress, and marginal plus to have Paul Hodes on top of the ticket in this seat, who will bring that 1-to-2 percent extra vote out for Annie Kuster.

Pickups now stand at 48.

Georgia, Virginia and North Carolina

Marshall –  he has been written off before, likely to hold with the tightening of the Governors race doing nothing but help.

Kissel won his seat by imploring serious grassroots organizing, and that still holds true for him this year. He ticked off many with his no votes on health care, but they are coming home to help him.

Nye is a strong candidate that votes his district and attracts strong crossover support.

Perriello  — a strong case for getting credit for doing what’s right and standing up for your votes.  Obama is coming to rally for him tonight.

Pickups now stand at 44.

Texas

Rodriguez—the demographics strongly favor a win by Ciro.

Pickups now stand at 43.

The Dakotas

Pomerory—unemployment is only at 4 percent in North Dakota, and Pomerory has a strong record of constituent service—the independent minded democrat holds on again.

Hurseth-Sandlin has voted her state and is running against a republican with flaws.

Pickups now stand at 41.

Idaho

Minnick – the Democrat-endorsed by the Tea Party, voted his district…he will hold on.

Pickups now stand at 40.

Illinois

Phil Hare, conservative district that continues to vote 55-60 percent for the democrat candidate for the House, spending is even and outside groups are almost spending more to badger the Republican.

Pickups now stand at 39.

Nevada

Dina Titus, another Dem who will get credit for standing up for her votes and showing leadership—and she does not have the negatives of Harry Reid. In the end she will hold this swing seat.

Pickups now stand at 38.

Colorado

John Salazar is strong candidate against weak Republican who received 37 percent of the vote last time he ran.

Pickups now stand at 37.

Those are the seats that the Democrats won’t lose. Now for the few they’ll actually flip:

Minnesota

Michele Bachman—she has the money and the media attention, but her actions and personality don’t fit the Midwest common sense approach of Minnesota…first upset of the night.   Tarryl Clark with the big upset.

Pickups now stand at 36.

Florida

Joe Garcia has run a strong campaign against a very weak flawed-almost off the ballot- republican.  Second somewhat surprise of Tuesday.

Pickups now stand at 35.

I could include other possible upsets (WA-8, CA, FL etc)

From leading on ideas, being prepared for the fight and the other side not offering any new ideas, lacking a true grassroots campaign and the voter being a lot smarter then pundits and the chatting inside the beltway give them credit for, the Democrats hold the House with a five-to-nine seat majority. You heard it here first.

Dear Jon:

I’m looking forward to attending your rally this Saturday, but like many, I’m not sure whether you are intending to simply produce a Daily Show-esque send-up of the whole rally-on-the-Mall concept, or whether this is the moment when you give the genuine rallying cry of “moderate!”

I know a lot of your fans are hoping you don’t undermine your hip satire with the mawkishness of actually caring.  But I, for one, sincerely hope that you are actually serious here, and that you have every intention of giving voice to “the people who think shouting is annoying, counterproductive, and terrible for your throat,” as you call them.

We need you Jon. You may be our last best hope.

As you know and well understand, political debate in this country is actually nothing at all like debate. The two parties and their loyal acolytes keep yelling right past each other. They effectively inhabit two separate unbridgeable worlds, drifting further and further apart.

The activist bases of both parties have been spending the last 30 or so years trying create a black-and-white world where you are either with us or against us. Increasingly, they hold the key to elected offices, especially on the Republican side, by being the source of campaign resources and energy. Meanwhile, a media culture drawn to sharp conflicts always zooms in on angry yelling over possible consensus for a simple reason: the schoolyard knife fight makes better TV than the debating society, and every attention-seeking pundit and politico now knows this.

And yes, this has excited and energized the most extreme elements on both sides, who by dint of personality are attracted to moral clarity these Manichean struggles offer. But it has turned off those who are prefer compromise and open-mindedness, who don’t see the world in such stark terms, who, as you put it: “who feel that the loudest voices shouldn’t be the only ones that get heard.”  Fewer and fewer Americans choose to identify themselves with either of the two major parties, and the plurality of Americans now think that neither party has “a clear plan for solving the country’s problems.”

The problem for political moderates is that there are so few leaders to turn to for inspiration.

But Jon, you know all this. It’s the basis for your satire. It’s why millions of viewers, especially those supposed disaffected young people who vote at significantly lower rates than their forebears, watch your show. You are the one who they trust.

I suspect that you are slightly uncomfortable with this power. You are, after all, a comedian at heart, the funny man who sits on the sidelines and says: you silly politicians, how you contradict and contort yourselves and say ridiculous things. Let us find the laughter in tragedy and thusly ease our sorrow over the sad fact that while we endlessly debate Christine O’Donnell’s latest gaffe, China is building a new city every sixteen seconds.

But sitting on the sidelines must also be frustrating. How can you curate the modern tragedy of American politics, day after day, and not think: why, the more I call attention to the idiocy, the more it metastasizes?

You have at your disposal the goodwill of millions of Americans. If you throw yourself into the political fray (as you may be about to, if this rally is indeed serious), you have the potential to make a major and I think quite positive impact on American political discourse. You are poised to be the leader of new moderate movement, one that rests on the premise of civil discourse, openness to reason, and an eagerness to actually solve problems.

I say, go for it. Make the most full-throated, heart-felt, call-to-reasonableness you can. Set up the moderate majority, or whatever you want to call it. Use your show and your brand to mobilize the millions of citizens who would pledge to support candidates who will adhere a platform of civility and open-mindedness and a spirit of pragmatic problem-solving – and who might even make it cool once more to solve problems instead of simply firing up the base. Be an explicit force for counter-polarization.

I know it’s a big task. But look around you. Glenn Beck and his merry band of truth-benders at Fox News are mobilizing the armies of cranky crazies to the right, and the loudest voices on the left are those complaining that Obama is a sell-out.  This country faces major, generational challenges of transitioning to a 21st-century economy and solving a looming deficit and entitlement crisis. We’re not going to solve them by shouting slogans past each other.

One hears a lot about the “enthusiasm gap” this election. But maybe the better term is “enthusiasm lack.” The vast majority of the American electorate is not at all jazzed up about their choices, and even if Republicans take back the House next Tuesday, it will hardly be because they inspired the American electorate. This is good news for Democrats in 2012, if they are smart enough to take advantage.

Consider the latest Associated Press-GfK Poll. With just a week until the election, one third of all likely voters say that they either haven’t yet made up their minds, or they are leaning in favor of one candidate but could still change their minds, though these undecideds are leaning slightly towards Republicans. This is hardly the sign of a passionate electorate.

Of course, midterm elections almost always have lower turnout than presidential elections anyway – typically about 40 percent of registered voters turnout in mid-term years, as opposed to 60 percent in presidential years. That missing 20 percent (or a third of those who vote in presidential elections) are often younger people and poorer people, but also those who tend to pay minimal attention to politics either because none of the candidates inspire them or they can’t see the difference.

Some quick back-of-the-envelope math: If 40 percent of the electorate winds up voting next week, but of that 40 percent only two-thirds feels strongly one way or another, we’re now down to roughly 27 percent of the electorate that has a strong feeling about the outcome. Since Republicans are doing better than Democrats among likely voters, let’s say that 15 percent of the electorate consists of Republican voters who currently feel strongly about how the election turns out. These are your hard-core, Tea Party-type Republicans who a Republican House majority would be representing.

Probably the only way this is a sustainable governing strategy is if the rest of the electorate remains so alienated and cynical that it continues to stay home while hard-core Republicans try to dismantle the idea of the modern state. Maybe this is the Republicans’ plan: make Washington so dysfunctional that nobody sees the point in voting anymore.

But here’s the more likely scenario: The presidential election of 2012 will bring out many of the voters who stayed home in 2010. Democrats will win back seats because turnout among registered Democrats and Democratic-leaning independent moderates will increase. (When Obama tells crowds ““If everybody who voted in 2008 shows up in 2010, we will win this election,” he is probably right.)

But in order for this to happen, Democrats have a challenge: they need to stay sane. They need to let the Republicans say and even try to do some of the ridiculous things that only 15 percent of the total electorate supports, all the while reinforcing how moderate and reasonable they are being, and not getting dragged into the gutter.

When the economy recovers (as it is already starting to), and the existential angst and fears of economic uncertainty dissipates, the Democrats (if they can refrain from counter-ranting and be the adults in the room) will come out looking much better, and will have a real mandate to proactively solve the major problems facing our country, like modernizing to meet the energy and infrastructure needs of the 21^st century.

There will be, of course, many recriminations next Wednesday within the Democratic faithful that Obama didn’t do this, or didn’t do that. But the past is the past.

The hand that Democrats are being dealt is this: Republicans are likely to win the House on a platform that appeals to maybe 15 percent of the total electorate (though 30-40 percent of the active electorate). But as long as Democrats can be savvy, remaining moderate and letting hard-core Republicans fulminate hysterically as only they know how about absurdities like repealing the 17^th Amendment, 2012 will be a very good year to be a Democrat.

Photo credit: Rakka

Yesterday, former Bush speechwriter turned Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson picked on Obama for publicly complaining that fear gets in the way of rational thinking, and that the electorate isn’t thinking straight because people are scared.

Gerson accuses Obama of intellectual snobbery, of falling prey to pseudo-science (“Human beings under stress are not hard-wired for stupidity, which would be a distinct evolutionary disadvantage,” insists Gerson – more about that in a moment), and most of all, that Obama is not a very good politician because a good politician would connect with fear, rather than rationalize it away.

Of course, anyone who has read one of the many recent behavioral psychology books explaining why we humans do many stupid things not in our best interest would get what Obama is talking about. As Professor Obama correctly notes, when we get frightened, we tend to not be as good at stepping back and thinking things through rationally.

And this makes sense, from an evolutionary psychology perspective. There is no time for planning when you are being attacked by a predator. In moments of real emergency, one needs to act on instinct. Moreover, if you’re in a fight-or-flight moment, you need to focus all your energy on survival. No sense being rational about the future when the future might not even exist.

Though we are no longer on the predator-infested savannah, in modern society, we still experience extensive stress that produces much of the same fight-or-flight feeling, like, say, if we are worried about losing our jobs and providing for our families.

Moreover, human beings are also hard-wired for instant gratification because for most of our existence as a species and a proto-species, we never know if we were going to be alive tomorrow. We are also hard-wired to get mad and throw temper tantrums to demonstrate that we mean business when we don’t get what we want.  That’s why it feels so good to act out and demand justice.

But a society of instant gratification and lashing out does not hold together well. Instead, much of the history of civilization can be seen as an attempt to find ways to sublimate our more destructive desires (those of the evolutionary old, reptilian brain) by using our ability to plan into the future (using our evolutionary new neocortex – the human brain) by enacting laws and teaching morality.

Obama, like many in the liberal tradition, believes in the collective ability of humans to reason and think past the immediate needs of what Freud called the id, and to achieve something bigger than our base desires.

But it’s a delicate balance. And Gerson is at least partially right: Obama hasn’t done as much to connect with the emotional concerns of everyday citizens (Clinton and Bush were much better at this)

Still, there’s also an important difference (that Gerson ignores) between honoring the fear and acting on the fear. Gerson writes: “There is fear out there in America – not because of the lizard brain but because of objective economic conditions.”  His mistake is separating the two. Yes, economic distress makes people afraid. But the “lizard brain” is the part of the brain that amplifies this fear and leads people to lash out in ways and demand things that may feel good in the moment but defy long-run logic.

Fear and anxiety may be natural human conditions, and we have probably evolved to be quite prone to them (being happy and calm was presumably not a great strategy for avoiding predators and stockpiling food once upon a time).

But we can also overcome our fears. There is, in fact, a long tradition of mindfulness meditation that teaches inherently anxious humans to accept their emotions without acting out on them. Obama seems to be much more able to allow intellect to triumph over emotion than most, but perhaps too much so that he doesn’t understand intuitively how might have a hard time. Gerson seems to assume that fear is always valid and shouldn’t be overcome through the intellect. Somewhere in the middle is a successful approach to coping with our emotions and making productive, rational choices about our collective future.

photo credit: JJ Judes