President Barack Obama appears on a television camera monitor during a news conference.
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Look at our political debates today. Is it liberal or conservative to oppose multibillion-dollar payouts for the bankers and insurers who flushed our economy down their gold-plated toilets? Our conception of politics is broken if it cannot account for the fact that Michael Moore and Glenn Beck come to some of the same conclusions while having very different philosophies. Yet pollsters and the media still rely on it, to frame politicians and themselves.
Sure enough, actual politics is proving the left-right spectrum to be inadequate. Three big off-year elections involved major candidates who were independent (New York City mayor and New Jersey governor) or third-party (the congressional election in New York, where the Conservative Party candidate forced out the Republican, who endorsed the Democrat). That's not to say "liberal" and "conservative" are useless, but they're not nearly enough.
Pretty plainly, Fox News is full of conservative opinion hosts, while its news wing has fixated on anti-Obama causes célèbres from ACORN to the tea-party protests. (Equally plainly, the White House is not concerned about fighting the bias of, say, MSNBC hosts who agree with it.) But Sean Hannity's Republicanism, Beck's populism and Mike Huckabee's Christian conservatism are very different--as are, say, Rachel Maddow's progressivism and Chris Matthews' Democratic insiderdom. American politics has civil libertarians and Wall Street conservatives and social-justice moralist-populists and much more.
And they all, in these unsettled times, have various issues with the centrist establishment--which has its own permutations and camps. All of this promises wild and interesting times for journalists to cover, but they won't be able to do it from the neutral center. Because there isn't one, and there never was.