The Centrist Manifesto

There is much to like in Wheelan's Centrist Manifesto. First and foremost, he does not fall into the usual trap befalling most third party fantasists - challenging the Republican/Democrat duopoly by running a candidate for President of the United States as a means to popularize and organize the party. While Wheelan does not specifically mention the historical futility of running a third party presidential campaign, he clearly understands that it is a path that leads to failure. His third party strategy neatly sidesteps this political land mine by simply not focusing on the Presidential race.The core concept of The Centrist Manifesto and what Wheelan calls "The Big Idea" is to elect 5-6 independent Senators who will act as a swing vote to moderate and broker the legislative agenda for the federal government. It is, in fact, a big idea because it is a third party strategy that can work. Unlike the Presidency, Independents like Angus King can and do get elected to the Senate in the United States. The modest goal of electing a handful of Senators is reasonable. Yes, It's still an extraordinarily difficult task. It still entails soliciting massive funding and creating all of the infrastructure of a national political party. It still entails convincing a significant voting block to organize around Centrist Party principles and identify as Centrist Party members. It still entails recruiting serious candidates of national stature to run under the Centrist Party banner. It's still an extreme long shot. But it could work.I am an advocate of voting to maintain a divided government in Washington D.C. in order to force moderation and bipartisanship. This is a complementary voting strategy with compatible objectives to the ones outlined in The Centrist Manifesto. In fact, although Wheelan never mentions it, maintaining a divided federal government is a necessary (if not sufficient) condition to implementing the Centrist Manifesto strategy. If either major party is elected into unified single party control of the executive and both legislative branches of Congress, particularly if they also have a filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate - as did the Democrats in 2009 - then a handful of Centrist Party Senators will be as irrelevant as Republicans were in 2009. Wheelan's Centrist Party senators need divided government to be effective brokers of centrist policy.While we like the strategy overall, we do have a few more quibbles with Wheelan's approach. He deserves credit for a staking out a series of political positions on controversial issues and identifying them as common sense "centrist positions." However, we sincerely doubt that the 70% closet partisans that political scientists say make up the bulk of his target 40% "Independent" voter block will agree with his policy characterizations. In fact, we are not sure we agree with his characterizations. Particularly on anthropogenic global warming, campaign finance, and gun laws.This is the crux of the problem and you can see it in the opinions expressed in some of the other Amazon reviews. There really are no "Centrist" policy positions. There are only compromise positions that emerge after hard fought negotiations that wind up somewhere between the partisan positions staked out by the right and left - satisfying neither. Any such compromised moderate centrist positions will undoubtedly make all partisans and "leaners" on the right and left equally unhappy. And there are a lot more partisans than there are "centrists". That's the reason it's a risky proposition for Wheelan to crown himself arbiter of the common sense Centrist policy. He doesn't get to decide. Still, without staking out policy positions, you cannot create a Party. It's the nature of the beast.Net net... Wheelan has come up with a strategy that could potentially tame the partisan beast, but it won't be easy.

What the author writes and deduces in this great book is nothing short of brilliant. We get constantly told as moderates or centrists that we don't have real convictions, because we refuse to drink the "kool aid" of extremists. We get told that we have to choose right or left as feminists. We get told we're apolitical for not making strong stands against society and the political machine.This book proves that all our naysayers are wrong and should read this book before they try to pick a fight! Centering things is how real work and decent laws get enacted. Centering can solve so many of our issues in order to find peace and balance. This is how we change society's ills not excabarate them.Thanks.

I've spent the last year exploring and perhaps floundering at the designs for what a viable third political party might look like (thefoundationparty.org). My folly has likely been that I focused too much on the process of the party as opposed to the platform. Maybe that was out of fear of alienating potential supporters, but with The Centrist Manifesto, Charles Wheelan has brilliantly unwrapped what a truly viable third party platform might look like.In this short but incredibly concise manifesto Charles uses deft feats of rationality to quickly unravel the partisan extremism that dominates our current two party system in order to reveal clear and pragmatic approaches to issues that have paralyzed our government for too long. From taxes to deficits, defense to welfare, gun rights to abortion, Charles eviscerates the fallacy of "impossible" problems to show how those of us caught in the middle can guide the United States back onto the path of prosperity.It is a bold call to action, but as Charles notes; do you really want to tell future generations that you only complained about the state of our government or that you were part of the movement to fix it? I'm obviously an extremely biased review, but if you have the least bit of concern about the direction our current political system has taken us, you should take the minimal amount of time to learn more about this truly viable alternative approach to politics.If this can break through the bubble, it will indeed be "an insurgency of the rational."

If you have political concerns, this book is for you.It's a great short follow on to the much longer  That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back . Both books conclude that a third party is now more than ever in America's best interest.Hopefully, it will also be a great follow on to Americans Elect which seems to have fallen by the wayside.In any event, if you have political concerns, read this book and then volunteer to to help fix the problems.Here's a quote from the book "If you think the American political system is broken, then you ought to do something about it. When your grandchildren ask you about the early-twenty-first-century --- about the growing debt and climate change and an increasingly dysfunctional Congress --- are you going to explain how you sat in an armchair and complained a lot? Or are you going to be able to tell your grandchildren that you were a founding member of the Centrist Party?"Read it! Then DO something!

Thoughtful and clear.