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Good Centrism

Ed Kilgore, in the course of praising my column about the brain-dead variety of centrism, defends Olympia Snowe's trigger mechanism as the good kind of centrism. I agree that it's certainly not a bridge halfway across the river kind of centrist compromise. It has a distinct logic to it. It's not my ideal policy, but a solid half a loaf that liberals should take.

The point I was trying to make in my column -- which i'm sure Ed got, but may not have come through the way I intended -- is that centrism can be a good thing, but it's not necessarily a good thing, and many varieties of centrism found in Washington are pretty mindless.