What’s a political moderate to do?

Opinion: October 4, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

What’s happening in this political cycle is partly normal. The two parties are rallying their most loyal supporters before the November vote, which leaves Democrats looking pretty liberal and Republicans preaching solid conservatism.

But their respective runs to the left and right still raise this question: What’s a moderate to do? That thought hit me as I listened to Texas Gov. Rick Perry speak to the National Conference of Editorial Writers last week in Dallas.

The Republican raised an important point about how much power we want consolidated in Washington. The federal government accounts for about 60 percent of all government spending in the United States, which places us behind only New Zealand and Britain among major nations, and you have to wonder just how much more we want our government to grow.

Enough?

Most Democrats in Washington don’t seem so bothered by that, so it’s good that Perry is raising it. How much is enough?

But when he and others, like Sarah Palin, start lauding the wonders of the people outside of Washington, they aren’t looking at the full picture. Texas, for example, now has a 17.3 percent poverty rate, which translates into 430,000 more Texans living in poverty than in 2008.

Texas’ economy, mercifully, outperforms those of other states. But we’ve got problems that no amount of pluck, entrepreneurship and shoe leather will resolve. Government, including the one in Washington, must play some role in helping poor families deal with circumstances.

Yet listening to President Barack Obama chat up the benefits of Washington’s health care overhaul makes me wonder the same thing: What’s a moderate to do?

He’s right that some of these measures are important, like requiring individuals to purchase insurance, but what about costs? This reform could sharply increase the deficit since half the measure is supposedly financed through promised cuts in Medicare payments to health care providers. Congress has never shown much inclination to do that before.

Centrist candidates

From a moderate’s perspective, the most encouraging news is New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s new effort to back centrist candidates. He has decided to get involved in races around the country where he feels he can back a moderate or fend off an extremist.

Bloomberg started as a Democrat, became a Republican but now is an independent. He’s the type of moderate who leans left on social issues but right on economics. And this isn’t his first rodeo when it comes to rounding up moderates. He appeared at a January 2008 forum that University of Oklahoma President David Boren held to rally voters in the middle and to encourage bipartisanship.

Bloomberg certainly has the wealth to make his presence known, so more power to him, especially if he can create a space for candidates who want to go beyond left or right.

That means leaders who promote social tolerance and limited government, who know government must help the needy but also maintain fiscal prudence, who understand that not everyone starts on the same base but who believe in markets’ ability to create opportunities and who believe equally in social compassion and personal responsibility.

The moon?

If that sounds like wanting the moon, it isn’t. We’ve had leaders who have synthesized the left and right halves of our politics. We just don’t have many of them today.

Obama started out to be one, but he’s losing the business community. Meanwhile, the Perrys on the right are giving us one side of the equation, important but incomplete.

So good for Bloomberg. Moderates need to fight back in this political season.

William McKenzie is an editorial columnist for The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.