Dear Centrist Elites, We Have A Centrist Party

Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s endorsement of President Obama today won’t change anything and it won’t be the linchpin in the fait accompli victory Obama will have in New York, but its worth noting because Mayor Bloomberg — along with Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz — is one of those elite centrists whose silly approach to politics often hurts the causes they believe in.

A lot of these guys — including people like Tom Friedman and Matt Bai at the New York Times — often rail about “both” parties as getting in the way of accomplishing the *very serious* things they think we need to be tackling. They see Republican denial of climate change and equate it to, well I’m not quite sure. There’s one party in America that takes climate change seriously, believes we need to invest in science-based education and understands that there are large intractable problems in society that can’t be left to the magical free hand of the market to solve. Like disaster rescue, for instance.

But our elite class hates this thing called “partisanship” and they think that acknowledging that one party — let’s say the Democratic party — actually gives two figs about solutions to the issues they care about will mean that they’re not being bipartisan and God knows what a drag that is at TED/Davos/The Aspen Institute.

So instead they practice this idiotic “a pox on both houses” strategy. You’ve seen it in cases like No Labels and various other efforts aimed at appealing to a centrism that doesn’t actually exist in America in the manner they’re appealing to.

The Democrats are, for better or worse, a center-left party. The people they nominate to the vast majority of their offices, from President Obama down to members of the House, are simply not as much to the left as the Republican party is to the right. Some of us think that needs changing over the long-term, but it also means that if you want centrist solutions to things its the only one of the two parties that is likely to return your phone calls.

But our centrist elites are often too busy in their ivory towers to pay attention to what’s really going on.