DOWN WITH MODERATION!

By Charles Krauthammer

Gripped with a mixture of dread and anticipatory ennui about the approach of the endless campaign, a nation yearns for political excitement. And lo, right on schedule, comes the fix: the quadrennial media romance with the center. With a pox on both their houses, with a jaundiced dismissal of prospective presidential candidates of all shapes, sizes and established parties, comes the celebration of what is called the radical center.

First onstage are the shock troops, the rabid Perotistas who appeared in Dallas just a few weeks ago. Now come the leaders: Colin Powell, in the midst of his book-tour campaign; Bill Bradley, bolting the Senate, positioning himself saintedly above it all; and the perennial Perot, winking and hinting and flaunting his 19%.

Followed by the pundits. Newsweek's Joe Klein calls the "radical middle" the "crucial swing vote in every major election." The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne Jr. advises Bob Dole to go after "the center of the spectrum" in pursuing the Republican nomination, rather than tack to the right. (The latter advice Dole got from Richard Nixon who, one might note, holds the world record--five--for nominations to Republican tickets.) USA Today touts a poll showing 62% yearning for a third party, 55% for an independent candidate as an alternative to Clinton and Dole.

So what? The people are always dissatisfied with their choices. Can you remember an election when they weren't? Remember Humphrey-Nixon? Ford-Carter? Bush-Dukakis? Was anyone enthusiastic about any of them? Take Reagan, who turned out to be enormously popular and charismatic. That was later. While he was still a candidate, distaste for him and his opponent was such that it created the phenomenon known as John Anderson, tribune of the center, choice of the sensible and now footnote of a footnote. Hyped and touted, he ended up with all of 6.6% of the vote. A decade later, Ross Perot got 19%, but with millions of dollars, even more hype, and in a field even more undistinguished than 1980's.

Think 1960 was an exception? Tricky Dick vs. Kennedy charisma: easy call. Think again. At the time, Kennedy was considered more callow than charismatic. Murray Kempton, for example, wrote this after witnessing an informal debate between Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson at the 1960 convention: "Flogged and whimpering, Kennedy bit it off and departed. This is the posture to be expected of all Booth Tarkington adolescents. The Kennedy boys are essentially punks." Camelot came later.

Camelot comes with the power and the prestige of office and with the apotheosis that follows assassination. True, some Presidents, like Clinton, never grow in stature even with the office. But all candidates, especially those merely grasping for the office, look squalid and small, petty and partisan. Which leads to the perennial search for the nonpartisan glamour candidate, new and large and living splendidly in the center.

But what, with all the media inflation, does the center have to offer that the current political parties do not? What, for example, is the radical-middle approach to the budget? We have two parties offering starkly clear ideological alternatives. The Republican budget would involve real changes for how the country is run. The Democratic alternative offers a very different set of priorities. Guns vs. butter. Tax cuts vs. Medicare. School vouchers vs. arts grants. Star Wars vs. Head Start. People can choose.

Would a radical-middle budget split the differences? That's nothing but mush. When established politicians do that, it is derisively--and accurately--called business as usual. Or perhaps a radical- middle budget is something higher and transcendent. If so, it is so lofty that no one can as yet discern it.

Perhaps it is mix and match. Colin Powell fancies a facile marriage of Democratic social compassion with Republican fiscal conservatism. This is a marriage made in heaven--and only in heaven. Here on earth, social programs run on money, not wishes. You cannot legislate compassion on an austerity budget. Sounds good in the abstract, and only in the abstract.

There is, in fact, only one issue on which the center offers something that really does transcend the two parties: campaign-finance reform. Both parties do have an interest in one version or another of the status quo. The center does not. But that is mostly because it is not (yet) a party. It has no real political existence. As soon as it does, the laws of nature take over and the new party, one can predict with confidence, becomes as corruptly self-interested as its predecessors.

But let us suppress our skepticism and even grant the middle's enduring incorruptibility on this issue. Apart from this single issue, where's the beef? What are these vaunted moderate solutions? What do they amount to, if not the mushiest of split-the-difference compromise?

In fact, the fascination and infatuation with the so-called center is a running away from real politics. Today, and especially after the election of 1994, real politics is offering real choices, sharply distinctive ideological choices on a cascade of issues: Medicare, welfare, regulation, affirmative action, immigration, taxation, the budget, the environment.

Would it have been better for the country had Clinton taken a wimpy middle position on affirmative action? Far better that he offered as strong a defense as he did, that the Republicans are opposed and that the country can now choose.

"Politics is broken," declares Bill Bradley as he quits the Senate. The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg, booster of a Powell-Bradley third-way ticket, echoes the sentiment and explains, "What ails the country is...the structural inability of our three-headed government--House, Senate, Presidency--to settle on a coherent policy program, carry it out, and then, after a decent interval, be judged on its success or failure."

But wait. Between 1992 and 1994, the Democrats did control all parts of our three-headed government. What happened? They found themselves unable to enact an agenda. What is the legacy of the 103rd Democratic Congress? Americorps. NAFTA (a Bush initiative, mind you). And "Don't ask, don't tell." That's it.

Partisans of a party with that sort of record naturally prefer to blame the system. But while the Democratic Party may be broken, the system is not. In fact, as Hertzberg admits in the very same editorial, it would take nothing more than the election of a Republican President to cure the system's allegedly structural problem. To elect any Republican President, even the most moderate (like Bob Dole), "would be to ensure the enactment of the entire Gingrichian agenda" advanced by the Republicans during the 1994 campaign.

It is a strange structural problem that is solvable as soon as the right party wins the next election.

For liberals, of course, Republicans are the wrong party. But liberals are also acutely aware how unsalable is the agenda and incompetent the politics of their own party. Hence their new solution: No party! Having nothing of their own to offer, they embrace the mirage of Powell-Bradley. Better ineffable mystery than what they otherwise concede the country really needs--a coherent policy program carried out, then judged on its success or failure--if administered by Republicans.

When critics say that our politics are broken, they mean that the system is seized by political gridlock and ideological stalemate, and nothing gets done for the country. This charge is invariably made by moderates on behalf of moderation. The great battle cry of the politics of the center is to end the stalemate and, as Perot puts it, get under the hood and fix it.

These antigridlock centrists seem comically unaware that the great source of gridlock in our system is moderate centrists of both parties and none. It is the mushy middle that muddies and obstructs and dilutes:

The balanced-budget amendment--an enormously, even scarily, radical idea--was blocked by a single Senate Republican. Who? Moderate of moderates, Mark Hatfield, media and radical-middle hero.

Liberals wanted radical reform on gays in the military. Who stopped it? Sam Nunn and the Democratic moderates. (And, remember, Colin Powell.)

Who slowed and watered down radical-welfare reform--defeating, for example, a "family cap" that would discourage irresponsible childbearing? Senate moderates, of course.

You may not agree with any of these reforms. But you must admit they are hardly do-nothing. These are not prescriptions for drift and inaction. They are bold marching orders. But middleness is the very enemy of bold.

Want to get things done? Let the ideologues, left or right, have a chance. They have ideas and proposed solutions. Let one or the other course be chosen, have its go and be judged on the results. Get the moderates out of the way. Their high-mindedness is only holding things up--to the approbation of those who later complain that nothing gets done.

There are, of course, good reasons to be a partisan of Colin Powell or Bill Bradley (though not of Ross Perot), but they are all reasons of personality, not politics. These are men of character and quality. They can inspire trust and confidence. In the case of Powell, his elevation as the nation's first black President would mark an extraordinary maturation of American race relations. But personality is not to be confused with politics. Indeed, by offering only personality, these men of the middle offer an escape from politics.

Their spin doctors and campaign managers will, of course, transmute personality into a kind of transcendence of politics. But that is an oxymoron. In democratic politics there is no such thing as political transcendence. That is the stuff of the romantic political extremism of Europe. Fascism, communism, Nazism offered politics as a passage to some higher reality. In democracies, and in particular in American democracy, life is more pedestrian. You offer your program, you make your case, you pass your legislation. The notion of rising above politics is either cynicism or sentimentality.

The Founding Fathers did not devise a system that was meant to be risen above. It was meant to be mundanely inhabited. Power was meant to be divided and dispersed. Our entire political engine was built precisely to produce conflict, tension, even gridlock. The way to rise above that is not with some man on a white horse mouthing mush. The way to elevate politics is to elect a man with a party and a program and give him a shot. The American way is Franklin Roosevelt, not Juan Peron.