REICH: The Phony Political Center

Tony Blair moved there with great success. So, of course, did Bill Clinton after 1994. George W. Bush was supposed to move there when he assumed office but hasn't yet, which cost the Republicans the Senate; maybe he'll move there now. Trent Lott seems constitutionally unable to travel there. John McCain is doing everything he can to get there. Al Gore lost what should have been an easy win by not remaining there.

Where? The Center. Such is the new wisdom according to political consultants, pundits and editorial writers. By moving to the center and claiming the ground as your own, the contemporary politician is almost guaranteed a second term, a second wind, favorable press,

public esteem, his party's revival. We are living in the golden age of political centrism, or so it seems.

But all that is meaningless blather. The political "center" is imaginary, and its recent elevation as a desirable place for politicians to inhabit is dangerously misleading. What's more, the politician who seeks to move there is abdicating any semblance of political leadership.

By one view, the center is wherever most people happen to be -- whatever positions are supported by the broadest consensus. Yet, as Walter Lippmann noted 80 years ago, public opinion is amorphous and doesn't stay in one spot for long. Staying centered, by this dim light, is nothing more than shifting with the polls.

That's something Blair has mastered, as evidenced by the British Labor Party's impressive victory earlier this month. In 1997, Britain seemed finally to have had its fill of Lady Thatcher's small-government Social Darwinism but was no more enamored of Old Labor's big-government planning. So Blair cleverly charted a "Third Way." He kept most of the Conservatives' budget plan intact but instituted a wage subsidy for low-income workers -- similar to Clinton's expanded Earned Income Tax Credit -- a much-heralded move to the center. Yet in his just-completed campaign, Blair promised to spend far more on public services such as health and education, for which Britons have been clamoring. So did he move back to Old Labor, or to a new center? Neither. He just stayed with the polls.

Blair has self-consciously modeled himself after Clinton. But was Clinton a centrist? It all depends when and how you look. In September 1993, when Clinton launched his universal health care plan, a Washington Post-ABC poll found 67 percent of Americans in support and only 20 percent opposed. The plan seemed ingeniously positioned smack in the center -- neither a lefty "single-party payer" scheme nor a right-wing, private, "fee-for-service" one. Republican Sen. John Danforth declared, "We will pass a law next year."

Barely five months later, universal health care was dead, with the plan widely condemned as too extreme. The subsequent Republican takeover of Congress was attributed in part to what was seen as "extremism," and the plan came to symbolize the supposed left-leaning waywardness of the first two years of Clinton's presidency. He never mentioned universal health care again.

Did the center move to the right? Not exactly.The Clinton plan appeared to move left. Its opponents created a specter of big government encroaching on individual choice, and they won the public relations war. Yet the ideal of universal health care has remained popular. An ABCNews.com survey this past April showed 52 percent preferring that the budget surplus be used "to provide health care for uninsured people," with 42 percent opting to "cut my taxes" instead.

Bush's giant tax cut didn't garner the support of a majority of Americans until just before it was passed. For months, polls had showed far less public enthusiasm for it than for beefing up education, saving Social Security or making health care more affordable. Yet the 12 Senate Democrats who joined an almost-unified phalanx of Republicans to nudge the cut down from $1.6 trillion to $1.3 trillion became the "centrists" who carried the day.