The Florida GOP presidential primary: calls for a third party ... by gimleteye

Observers of presidential politics in America will want to spend some time reading and cogitating "The Obama Memos" by Ryan Lizza in this week's New Yorker. 

Lizza reminds us that Barack Obama ran as the post-partisan president, "proposing himself as a transformative figure, the man who would spring the lock." But nothing of the sort happened, and not because of Obama.

Lizza reports of data by political scientists Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal. According to data, "both the House and Senate are more polarized today than at any time since the eighteen-nineties."

Polarization also has affected the two parties differently. The Republican Party has drifted much farther to the right than the Democratic Party has drifted to the left. Jacob Hacker, a professor at Yale, whose 2006 book, “Off Center,” documented this trend, told me, citing Poole and Rosenthal’s data on congressional voting records, that, since 1975, “Senate Republicans moved roughly twice as far to the right as Senate Democrats moved to the left” and “House Republicans moved roughly six times as far to the right as House Democrats moved to the left.” In other words, the story of the past few decades is asymmetric polarization. Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lizza#ixzz1kqkHMrcI

This "asymmetric polarization" is true in Florida. Democrats in the Southeast counties, like Miami-Dade, are more liberal than the blue dog version in the northern parts of the state. For governor, Democrats continue to push forward candidates like Alex Sink, a former banker and state treasurer, whose commitment to an imagined middle ground was the centerpiece of her ill-fated campaign against Rick Scott.

But there is nothing that resembles a middle ground in Republican politics in Florida today; witness the clamoring by Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney to be "the conservative" values-voter candidate, scrubbing for legitimacy in the far right corners of political ideology.

Lizza writes, "Two well-known Washington political analysts, Thomas Mann, of the bipartisan Brookings Institution, and Norman Ornstein, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, agree. In a forthcoming book about Washington dysfunction, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” they write, “One of our two major parties, the Republicans, has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime, scornful of compromise, unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lizza#ixzz1kqlplCNu

These points also resonate in Florida where Republicans-- at least those in power and whose views are represented in public forums-- are indeed unpersuaded by facts, evidence and science. This explains the perverted logic of rejecting federal intervention in the matter of regulating water quality in Florida, as though we are too poor and dumb to clean up the mess we have made of the state. The absolute conviction that somehow the US EPA and regulations are to blame for job loss and the worst economy since the Great Depression defies logic, too. The GOP has simply gone off the rails.

If it is even worse than it looks, isn't it time for a centrist party to emerge? It might be along the lines of points adopted by Congressman Ron Paul; socially liberal-- based on a fear of government intervention in personal lives, fiscally conservative-- based on a conviction that neither political party has demonstrated a clear understanding of limited government-- and in foreign policy, reigning in military budgets and unrealistic ambitions.

Conventional thinking has always held that it would be a Green Party that would emerge in the United States as a third party. But watching the irrational behavior of the GOP-- filtered by Lizza through the failure of Obama to bridge the great divide-- one senses that the only way forward for Republicans and independents, too, is a centrist party that rejects the immoveable far right and takes heart from Ron Paul or Alan Simpson.