NP: John Cage, 4'33"

I want to touch on this before it falls into that vast chasm of topics I leave untended, as evidenced by a ridiculous number of del.icio.us tags and Bloglines clippings that I never, ever go back and check.

It's about trying to trick people into thinking you have an ideology that you don't actually give a shit about. I'm reading John Avlon's Independent Nation, which really brings home the notion that there's no real standard-bearer for centrism in this day and age, for much the same reason that soccer isn't popular in the United States. It's not good television.

Yet there's this whole Democratic Leadership Council that tries to rein in the Daily Kos' of the world and tack the Democrats into the center behind, say, Hillary Clinton. Except that nobody seems to believe she's really a centrist. There's cognitive dissonance there. The thing about pragmatic centrists is that they know their own kind. The whole point is a break from politics as usual, so it makes us somewhat immune to pandering. I think.

Now we're seeing the same thing on the right. Josh Marshall touches on it today in reference to the growing chasm between Bush in Republican theory and Bush in practice, post-Katrina. Whether it's Harriet Miers or Hurricane Katrina, there's a growing disconnect there, as more and more Americans start to suspect that Dubya's not what he said he was.

What this means going forward, I have no idea. There's still no real centrist leader that can lead us to the promised land. I'm more and more fascinated by these stories of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, but not unlike romanticizing the Beatles versus Britney, I'm not sure someone like that could actually succeed in this day and age.