In case you missed Shoebox’s discussion of a piece that identifies Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as essentially left-of-the-Democratic-center (which is well left of the actual center) clones, do read it. It does illustrate the divide that has happened in the last 20 years, and also identifies McCain as left-of-the-Republican-center.
There is an assumption made by Kevin Poole and company that I do take exception to, however. Take another look at one of the graphics Shoebox borrowed from them, specifically the one comparing the 90th, 100th and 110th Congresses.
It would appear at first glance that the Left hardly moved further left over the last 40 years, while the Right moved quite a bit further right over the same time. However, that assumes that the middle didn’t move either direction. I beg to differ.
Just as a singular example, let’s take a look at Medicare. Back in 1965, roughly half of the Republicans were opposed to its creation (do ignore the error in the House Dems’ “no” vote total; it is a government operation I’m linking to). Of course, since they were in an extreme minority, it passed rather handily.
Fast forward to 2003. In the face of a decade of projections declaring that Medicare was facing a financial time bomb, President Bush (R) proposed a massive expansion of Medicare in the form of prescription drug benefits. Nearly all of the House Republicans and Senate Republicans agreed.
I know, it’s not perfect (neither Congress in the chart was the one that voted on Medicare), and McCain did vote against the drug bill, but it is rather illustrative of the leftward tilt of the Republican Party. I could also mention pork, the shift of the rhetoric of tax-rate cuts from actually reducing the amount of taxes taken in by government to raising the amount of taxes taken in by government, and the utter abandomnent of the idea of getting rid of government agencies.
Before the Lefties start streaming in to say that proves they’ve moved to the right, I’ll briefly touch on why so few Democrats agreed to that expansion of government-run health care. It was not because they didn’t want to also expand Medicare; it was because they wanted to go even farther. Indeed, their Presidential candidates and the last Democratic President wanted to create a “full-coverage” government-run health care system, and saw this as too small a step.
As we discussed off line, the clearest evidence of the leftward shift of the “0.0” point is the fact that McCain has stayed at the same spot through the 3 graphs. It’s clear that his votes, especially the last 3-4 years have moved left. The only way to reconcile the two is for the 0.0 point to have moved left in the same proportion as McCain’s votes have. The net is that while it would appear that the R’s have moved right, they have actually stayed mostly in place and McCain and the Dems have moved left.