There's a promo on TV right now for a new sitcom that includes one of the characters saying something like this: "My girlfriend wanted a cat, and I didn't, so we compromised. We got a cat." That rather lame humor does illustrate a valuable point: Sometime there is no such thing as a compromise. There is no way to reconcile getting a cat or not getting a cat -- somebody has to give in. Sometimes there can be the illusion of a compromise -- getting a dog, for example. But that involves both parties believing they are getting something they are not -- that having the dog is the same as having a cat, that having a dog is the same thing as having no animal at all.
So, here comes Arnold Schwarzenegger, the latest in a long line of politicians calling for a "third way," something that would not be Democratic or Republican but, somehow, "all inclusive," for "all the people" instead of just those silly liberal and conservative partisans:
“I saw that people, not just in California, but across the nation, were hungry for a new kind of politics
Comments
"But don't try to sell me a dog and tell me it's a cat."
Precisely.
To me, President Lincoln is endlessly fascinating, and in many ways he was ahead of his time. An illuminating book on his life-long Whiggish tendencies is Gabor Borrit's Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream.
In short, Lincoln was a 'big government' guy - massive 'internal improvements', national banking, and the tariff (or 'protectionism' - proudly proclaimed as such!) were dear to his heart. But by the mid 1840's, the Whig party was thoroughly whipped on their principle ideas - which they promptly ran away from. Lincoln had more or less exited the public political arena, and focused on his remunerative law career (after helping to bankrupt Illinois!)....and then the Missouri Compromise got repealed (by the Kansas-Nebraska Act), and the unchecked extension of slavery loomed.
The nascent Republican Party was a coalition of disaffected Democrats (who were, amongst other things, viscerally anti-tariff and anti national-bank) and displaced Whigs like Lincoln.....
and the 1850's "third way", for Abe, was to keep his mouth firmly shut about issues that he still held dear (such as the tariff) but which would upset the ex-Democrats in the Republican coalition, and instead focus on the issue that united them all (and interestingly, for different reasons) - opposition to the extension of slavery.
By way of saying - yes. Politics, like war, always boils down to two main opposing coalitions (the "in"s and the "out"s!), and there is not a third.
But infinite combinations of the elements within those coalitions can be tried....
The reason Arnold's plan is a "third way," Leo, is because it manages to piss off everybody -- union liberals who don't think the working poor should be compelled by law to buy insurance, conservative business owners who don't want to be compelled by law to pay employee benefits, right-wing xenophobes who don't want to be compelled by law to pay for brown people on the public dole, and insurance companies who don't want to be compelled by law to cover people who aren't in perfect health.
Sounds like the King Solomon solution we've all been waiting for. The threat of this kind of regulation just might scare the health care and insurance industries into making medicine affordable again. It would be premature to condemn the effort.
>But don't try to sell me a dog and tell me
>it's a cat.
You might also have said, Don't hand me a dog and expect me to believe it's BETTER than a cat.
"right-wing xenophobes who don't want to be compelled by law to pay for brown people on the public dole"
I don't want to be compelled by law to pay for *any* illegal aliens on the dole, whatever their skin color. It seems that illegal alien activists and sympathists like alex are, although often white themselves, anti-white bigots--"self-hating whites", if you will. (Though interestingly, you