ON POLITICS AROUND THE CENTER

VEERING OFF
The Washington Post has a piece this weekend on the post-election debate of whether we're still a Center-Right country, or if there's been a shift to Center-Left.  Here's how it frames the issue*:

"We are now two elections into something big. This month's drubbing is just the latest sign that the country's political center of gravity is shifting from center-right to center-left. Republicans who fail to grasp this could be lost in the wilderness for years.

Here's the stark reality: It is now harder for the Republican presidential candidate to get to 50.1 percent than for the Democrat. My Hoover Institution colleague David Brady and Douglas Rivers of the research firm YouGovPolimetrix have been analyzing data from online interviews with 12,000 people in both 2004 and 2008.

It shows an overall shift to the Democrats of six percentage points. As they write in the forthcoming edition of Policy Review, "The decline of Republican strength occurs by having strong Republicans become weak Republicans, weak Republicans becoming independents, and independents leaning more Democratic or even becoming Democrats." This is a portrait of an electorate moving from center-right to center-left."

The debate is far from academic given where Republican find themselves at the end of these recent elections:

"...President-elect Barack Obama, a nearly filibuster-proof Democratic majority in the Senate and the largest Democratic majority in the House of Representatives since 1993..."

The piece goes on to posit how things may roll out:

"Today's Democrats may well overreach in much the same way that Republicans did after they won their congressional majority in 1994, when they took the "center" out of center-right. If so, Democratic hubris will create opportunities for the GOP to get a hearing.

And so far, center-left government is largely an abstraction for the country.
People like the sound of it, especially against the backdrop of a financial crisis and recession. In these center-left times, voters are receptive -- or rather, it is their receptiveness that makes these times center-left.  But whether they will like the new Obama tilt in practice remains to be seen."

I'm not sure Republicans can be afford to be patient and hope that the mainstream of the country tilts back their way over the next four or eight years, primarily driven by the presumed over-reaching by the Democrats.  Pendulums take a long time to gather momentum either way, and this one just seems to be starting it's swing the other way.
Republicans really need to take a look at themselves in the mirror as a whole, and see where the Center in Center-Right was lost.

*Image Source.