You were promised a 12-step solution: it’s called Unity08. Unity08 is basically a gang of smart, hopeful politicians and recovering consultants, young people and business types who want to run a third party candidate in 2008 who will be selected entirely by delegates to Internet convention, through online voting. The president and vice president must either be from different parties or independents. ~Dick Meyer

I share Ezra Klein’s strong antipathy for Unity08, which he stated most powerfully in this bloggingheads appearance with Ross Douthat.  He said: “I can’t overstate how much I loathe Unity08.”  Hear, hear!  “It’s truly insulting to the real disagreements,” he added later.  The premise of Unity08 reminds me of some of the obnoxious traits of centrists I laid out in my list of traits of “centrist extremists”:

–never trusts in any dogmatic statement, but believes that the truth always lies “somewhere in between” two extremes, which he has conveniently pre-selected so that the happy middle matches his own views precisely.

–thinks that partisanship is the cause of nation’s political woes, and consequently thinks that bipartisanship is the solution to most, if not all, of those woes.

–doesn’t like negative campaigning.

The Atlantic ran an article on Unity08.  Joshua Green described how the ‘great’ movement began:

The three decided on the spot that they would create a third party to represent the center in the 2008 presidential election.

Perhaps I find this painfully insulting for some slightly different reasons than Ezra Klein, but painfully insulting it surely is.  The strange thing about the idea behind Unity08 is this claim that the center is somehow unrepresented, pushed down or out of the way by the two-party system when the two-party system abides in a very narrow political center in which a Sam Brownback is regarded as fairly far-right in most quarters and Chuck Hagel can be described, without irony, as a “rock-ribbed conservative” on numerous occasions.  From my perspective, which is admittedly on the very distant rightwards edge of the spectrum, the idea that the center lacks for representation is crazy.  Virtually nothing but the very narrow middle 10-20% band of American opinion that is the consensus center-right and center-left has any meaningful representation.  Hundreds of millions of people stand outside of this narrow band for one reason or another.  The mockery that the two-party system makes of representative government is not that it somehow artificially forces a broadly unified American people into rival, warring camps, but that it very artificially insists that all kinds of people who have no business being in the same party (such as, say, Brownback and Giuliani) should be smashed together and their distinct voices stifled for the sake of preserving the narrow consensus.

Even in their would-be rebellion, Unity08 is drearily conventional:

The creators of Unity08 believe that the answer is to open the process to the Internet masses, causing a tectonic shift powerful enough to disrupt the two-party system. They have not, however, lost faith in that system—merely in its power to correct itself. “The two-party system has worked well for 200 years and can continue to do so,” Bailey says, “but only when elections are fought over the middle. Our goal is to jolt the two parties into recognizing this, by drawing them into a fight over the middle rather than allowing them to keep maximizing the appeal to their bases at the extremes.”

This is where it goes from merely annoying to insulting.  Elections always are fought over the middle right now.  Remember 2000?  The most uneventful, boring election in the history of this country?  Why was it so dull?  Until Gore discovered some populist rhetoric towards the end, the contest was fought entirely over the middle by saying as little as possible about everything.  “Compassionate conservatism,” while a massive fraud in its own way as far as the conservative part went, existed to appeal to the middle and, to some extent, to the center-left.  Even the primaries in the two parties are ultimately being fought over who will serve as the best standard-bearer who can appeal to the general electorate.  Manipulating and whipping up “the base” and actually representing them are radically different things: one demonstrates contempt of party elites towards their supporters, the other indicates that the party actually serves its members.  Obviously, the former arrangement prevails to differing degrees in both parties.  The idea that elections are held captive by wacky extremists is one that partisans from both sides enjoy circulating when it helps undermine the opposing party’s candidate, but how many people really believe that Hillary is some rabid leftist?  By my standards, she is, but then by my standards so are George Bush and Sam Brownback, so perhaps my standards are not very representative.

What does Unity08 aim to do?  It does not aim to rebalance or fundamentally restructure the political system as we know it.  They just want to give the system a jolt and get it “back on track.”  They assume, of course, that the normal state of affairs for the last several decades is somehow not “on track.”  For these people, the two-party system is assuredly failing the American people, but they were under some misguided impression that it had ever really done the job they think needs to be done.  This effort isn’t political reform.  It’s a snit-fit parading as high-minded idealism and pragmatism all rolled into one.  At least ideological and policy protest votes for coherent third parties have a certain logic to them.  In theory, the existing minor parties would like to become real players in policymaking and they would like to become permanent parts of the system. 

Unity08 aspires to nothing but acting as a one-time defibrulator for the heart of American representative government.  If more radical surgery is needed, they aren’t going to bother.  Not only is this a loathsome pose in the eyes of people actually interested in correcting the flaws in the present system, but it is a nonsensical one as well: when it comes time to vote, voters become very tribal and rally for or against a candidate for visceral, irrational and often inexplicable reasons.  If there is a ticket that represents bipartisanship for the sake of bipartisanship, no one will pay any attention to it.  It neither excites nor terrifies–it puts you to sleep, like listening to Joe Lieberman talk.  The entire effort is based on it being shocking and invigorating, when it is almost guaranteed by its very design to be plodding and uninteresting.