The new "vital center" now that the traditional "moderates" have been purged
by digby
Chris Hayes noticed something that seems to have eluded almost everyone else: there are no "moderate" GOP House members:
I would also point out that as everyone praises Reid and Pelosi for their masterful shepherding of the notoriously inconstant Democrats through this last round, it's undoubtedly a lot easier without a bunch of House Blue Dogs and the likes of egomaniacs like Lieberman and Nelson to gum up the works. There's a lot of Village angst these days about the inability of the two parties to sit down together and throw back a few Old Fashioneds like TipnRonnie used to do, but I'm afraid it's the natural outgrowth of the two parties finally dividing along the ideological lines that formed after the civil rights movement. It is what it is.
The good news is that the Democratic Party, which held on to its inappropriate reactionaries for far longer than the GOP held its liberals, will finally have a chance to at least fight to a draw on the major issues that separate the two parties. The bad news is that there is plenty of terrain for big bipartisan consensus around taking good care of the two parties' most precious assets: their billionaire benefactors. I'm afraid that's the only thing the "vital center" of our two parties agree on. And they are very much in agreement.
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