Moderates

Too often, moderate incumbents like Lugar lose perspective of why they were elected, how to do their jobs and the plight of their constituents.

Clearly winner-take-all amplifies partisanship and polarization in Congress; it is therefore antagonistic toward the goal of achieving a more collaborative and collegial legislature.

Reasonable is not working. If I hear one more politician rail about the need to find bi-partisan common ground where immediate deficit reduction and job growth live in some sort of economic harmony, I am going to get sick. It isn't going to happen.

Late at night or in the early hours of the morning when it's difficult to sleep because the mind won't shut down President Obama must often think to himself, "To be a moderate, or not to be? That is the question".

After a lifetime of being a moderate Republican candidate, official, consultant and staffer, Dave has no trouble saying that he voted for Obama in 2008 and plans to again. But he's having a devil of a time saying that he's a Democrat now.

MERRIMACK, N.H. -- Mitt Romney says the tea party is good for Washington. The Republican presidential contender's comments come as the Democratic Par...

Consider three Americans: a gay businessman who wants to lower taxes; a scientist who teaches evolution but opposes amnesty for the illegal; an agnost...

Rather than the American conservative mantra that one more immigrant means one less American job, Canada has pegged immigration to economic growth and has attempted to make the nation a global magnet for talent.

WASHINGTON -- As tension builds over compromise between the GOP-led House and Democrat-led Senate, Democratic Sens. Tom Carper, Mark Udall and Kay Hag...

In election after election, the same opportunity remains unrealized -- the possibility that either extreme could unite with the center to exclude the most extreme policies of the other.

The president, by reaching out to business, is helping get millions of Americans back to work and at the same time increasing his chances of being elected to a second-term in the White House.

Krugman is pessimistic that calls for greater civility in political discourse will be met with success because, in his view, there are two sides to the debate that do not share a common morality.

President Obama's move to the political middle, by extending Bush tax cuts and unemployment insurance for millions of out of work Americans, offers his best hope for re-election in 2012.

Pundits are now beginning to say Obama is on a comeback, which is a stunning turnaround from less than two months ago, when the president sheepishly began using the word "shellacking" for the midterm results.

While they differ ideologically, extreme conservatives and extreme liberals share the same basic philosophy about the nature of fiscal policy. It is framed as a false choice between two extremes.

The collective Center took what President Obama characterized as a "shellacking" in the 2010 midterm elections. The carnage at the center hit both s...

From 2006-2008, I studied political polarization in great detail at the University of Pennsylvania. My final research project can be found online here...

More necessary than a rally is a counterweight to the political extremism so commonly lent a media platform. Otherwise, the middle is just a collection of witty slogans and cartoon thought-bubbles.

Based on my experience from the 1994 cycle and based on the poll of independents that we did, I offer these suggestions to those surviving Blue Dogs and other conservative Democrats that come back into Congress licking their severe wounds.

Freedom is working when it is most "uncomfortable," and the U.S. Constitution is at its best when it's tremendously inconvenient. Don't confuse something being uncomfortable with something being unfair.

The far right, the far left and special interest groups are well-funded, articulate, and exercise their democratic rights to shape public opinion. The rest of us either can't find our voice or can't get heard.

In politics, just like in baseball, you really do need a scorecard to get the most out of the exercise.