THE RADICAL CENTER.

• Author: REED, BRUCE
• Position: Review

THE RADICAL CENTER by Ted Halstead and Michael Lind Doubleday, $24.95

NOT SO LONG AGO, "CENTRIST" WAS practically a dirty word in politics. Democrats roared every time Texas populist Jim Hightower said, "The only two things you'll find in the middle of the road are yellow stripes and dead armadillos." For three decades, Republicans marched like lemmings to Goldwater's credo, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice."

Today, the lemmings are dead, and the middle of the road is getting awfully crowded. The bipartisan Senate Centrist Coalition has 41 members. In the House, Republican moderates--thought for years to be extinct--now routinely rebuff President Bush on offshore drilling, campaign-finance reform, and regulations left over from the Clinton administration. Even Tom DeLay (R-Texas) couldn't stop himself from voting for a centrist education bill, sheepishly promising to resume his right-wing jihad later.

Centrists used to be inescapably bland, like Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) and Howard Baker (R-Tenn.). Not anymore. Now left and right are a snooze and centrists make good copy: John McCain, Jesse Ventura, Bill Clinton. Even some centrists who used to be dull aren't dull anymore, like Jim Jeffords, who's writing two books about his late-life switch from Clark Kent to Superman. These days, the political world yawns at another Al Sharpton hunger strike. We're waiting for that Jeffords diet book.

Pockets of extremism survive on cable channels and in the first drafts of Bush administration policy papers. The Bush crowd still seems to think triangulation means checking with Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and Grover Norquist. You have to give them credit. They promised a more efficient White-House, and they have delivered. In the Clinton administration, it took us two whole years to lose the Congress. The Bush team did it in just four months.

Bush campaigned as the accidental centrist, whose one political achievement in Texas--education reform--coincided with his party's greatest political weakness. In office, his advisers have traded centrism for catechism. They chose Spain for his first state visit, Mexico for his first state dinner, and an audience with Pope John Paul II for his first state of purgatory. When John Kennedy ran for president, Protestants used to worry that the pope had a secret plot to take over America. Now Catholics should worry that Rove has a secret plan to take over the Vatican. If the Spanish Armada invaded Miami, Bush would have...