Things fall apart, the center will not hold

From Ben Smith's Daily News blog: New York Dem Sen. Chuck Schumer said "We're in better shape than [Republicans] are, because they don't realize that Reaganomics is dead, that the reagan philosophy is dead," he said. "We realize that New Deal democracy, which is still our paradigm, which is sort of appeal to each group ... that doesn't work any more."...

E.J. Dionne advises the Repubs to go for a more innovative, more pragmatic (?) tact in his Washington Post article Can the GOP Find Its Center: "The party's credibility on national security has been shattered by the failure of the Bush administration's policies in Iraq. Many Republicans know this, which is why President Bush's biggest problem in his last two years will be not the Democratic opposition to the war but the growing ranks of Republican political pragmatists who want to separate themselves from Bush's Middle East venture...."

As an independent, I would say it's not the paradigms we need to be concerned about, as the parties shuffle back and forth back and forth trying to win elections. And the answer, to the extent that we can create one, will come about through out of the box, on the ground organizing.