I am horribly confused. Michael Bloomberg’s fantasy of running for president as a “centrist” candidate has officially foundered, according to Chuck Hagel, now that John McCain has locked up the Republican nomination. Why?
Well, apparently, according to the Times, Bloomberg is a moderate and a centrist, and so is McCain. These adjectives, in McCain’s case, are simply asserted as fact. (“Yes, the mayor’s chances are diminished by the success of Senator John McCain, a moderate candidate who has emerged as the Republican front-runner.”)
So, we are to believe, McCain and Bloomberg occupy the same mythical “center” of the ideological center, which is apparently located one half of the distance between liberal and conservative. That being the case, there’s not a speck of difference between them, so long as you don’t count their views on abortion rights, gay rights, aid to cities, the death penalty, gun laws, realistic views toward taxes (Bloomberg thinks that taxes are a necessary evil). Only in the weird and wonderful world of our corporate media could these guys be considered to represent similar political positions. They can’t both be “centrists”, if the word is to have any meaning.
In fact, from a brief review of the article on Bloomberg at Wikipedia, it appears that the only things of substance about which they truly agree is the advisability of the Iraq war and a craven allegiance to the interests of corporate America. Given the fact that the most Americans have long since come to the conclusion that the war in Iraq was a mistake and has been a miserable failure, it hardly seems like a position in favor of the war defines a central position in today’s political landscape. Nor does fealty to corporate America. But then again, maybe in the minds of the media, those positions define the center, at least their view of the “responsible center”. Apparently, judging from the tepid response Bloomberg’s fantasy candidacy engendered, the American people don’t agree.
What’s truly annoying about this article is the easy way in which the reporters label McCain a “moderate” or “centrist”; descriptions he himself eschews. The man is a certified right winger; he’s just not completely balls out crazy, though he’s a lot closer to being balls out crazy than most people realize. This is just another illustration of the fact that in this country, at the present time, the acceptable continuum of political thought consists of a mild liberalism on the left, to a theocratic/corporatist/totalitarian conservatism on the right. Lefty positions outside of that continuum (single payer health care, for instance, which is a fact of life in most rational democracies) are simply defined as being outside the bounds of acceptable discourse, while no right wing position, no matter how extreme (e.g., torture, “unitary executive”, i.e., presidential dictatorship) is out of bounds on the right. And so the media defined “center” drifts to the right, while the actual center drifts left.
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