Muscular Moderates?

oldstyleliberal thinks the big story of the 2006 elections was the emergence of a "muscular middle" in the Democratic Party, represented by the likes of Senator-elect Jim Webb of Virginia ... as well as in the GOP, represented by the re-election as California governor of Arnold Schwarzenegger. "The Middle Muscles In" is how New York Times columnist David Brooks put it. For both parties, "mobilizing the base" à la Karl Rove has suddenly ceased being the order of the day.

The "base," of course, consists of the ideologically extremist activists who dominate each party at primary election time: extremists of the left, for the Democrats; of the right, for Republicans. Because the two parties have long ceased to cover the whole ideological spectrum, as each party once did, each party seemingly has a base and a middle — but no one in opposition to act as an internal counterweight to the extremist base. Until now. Maybe.

"For the most part," Brooks says, "they [the voters] exchanged moderate Republicans for conservative Democrats." Thus, Connecticut returned pro-Iraq War Democrat Joe Lieberman to the U.S. Senate as an independent. He will caucus with the very Democrats who abandoned him and boosted his victor in the Connecticut primary, the antiwar challenger Ned Lamont, in his stead. Were Lieberman to refuse to caucus with his erstwhile party, the Democratic caucus would boast only 50 members, not an absolute majority — and that number only because a second independent, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, will also join Democratic voting ranks in the Senate.

For his part, Virginia Senator-Elect Jim Webb, who proudly served in the Reagan Administration as Secretary of the Navy and in Vietnam as a U. S. Marine, opposed the Iraq War. His razor-thin margin over GOP incumbent George Allen is as responsible as anything for putting the Democrats over the top in the next Senate. So the new Democratic surge of moderates is actually as divided as ever over Iraq, right? Lieberman supports the war, Webb doesn't. What are we to make of that? What will the Democratic Party make of it?

And what of all those arch-liberal Democrats who are used to taking charge of their party ... even if in the recent past it has meant losing elections left and right? Where will the heart of the party be found in the next two years, during the run-up to the 2008 presidential election? Where exactly is the heart of the Democratic Party?

Look at it this way. It's pretty clear that the "muscular moderates" who decided this off-year election don't want the government held hostage to the extremists of either party. They thumbed their noses at President Bush because he got in bed with neo-conservative idealists and started the Iraq War. Now the question is: what will the moderates do if people like Webb and Lieberman get into bed with the leftist idealists among the Democrats?

oldstyleliberal doesn't really care whether they and their ilk do so out of personal conviction, or not. Though not arch-liberals themselves, they may still drift left to pander to the arch-liberals because the left controls the party, the party controls the Congress, and they want their share in all the power and glory. Decades ago, a left-leaning Democratic centrist such as John F. Kennedy could point out that he couldn't win the White House without the help of his conservative southern brethren. No longer. The southern conservatives switched parties at about the time of the Reagan Revolution.

So will the hard left overreach and try to assert itself too mightily in coming years, insisting on such immoderate bugaboos as legalized gay marriage and a no-holds-barred defense of unfettered abortion rights? Or will the muscular moderates stand firm and resist such a leftward intra-party dynamic? Stay tuned. It should be interesting.