Hi, Tom--

I wish I had a dollar for every time Democratic politicians and their toadies in the press have "advised" Republicans, for their own good of course, to "compromise" and become more "moderate"--words which have only one meaning now: "move closer to Democratic positions."



The hoped-for result: an election where the voters get to choose between a consistent, solid leftist Democrat and a wishy-washy, inconsistent sort-of-leftist Republican. A faded carbon copy of a Democrat.

Republicans would stay home in droves, and Democrats would, not too surprisingly, vote for the Democrat.



You are mistaking John McCain for Wendell Wilkie. Wilkie ran on the platform of being a better FDR than FDR. FDR, of course, won.

Have you not been paying attention to what just happened in the Republican primary in your own state?

Gray Davis chose his own opponent by attacking the one he thought would be the more difficult to beat. His target was Dick Riordan, the moderate Republican. He has handpicked a hotbutton conservative to run against. Why do you think he did that?

Davis did that because he knows, the way all professional politicians know, that the idealogues of either party are going to remain idealogues, and will always be a loss to the opposing party, but the moderates of both parties are more likely to look for the more moderate candidate. This is how he intends to win re-election to your statehouse.

Bill Clinton got elected to the White House not because he was a liberal but because he was conservative for a Democrat. He won moderate Republican votes, as well as moderate Democratic votes. The extreme left of the Democratic Party of course voted for Clinton because they were voting for the lesser of two evils, as they saw it.

Are you saying that extreme rightists aren't smart enough to realize the same political reality when faced with a moderate Republican versus an extreme leftist Democrat? If that's true, they deserve to lose.

In politics, the opposite of one extreme is not the other extreme, but the middle. My family, pragmatists all, though of varying economic and social philosophies, have a cynical saying on Election Day: "I'd better go to the polls. I have somebody to vote against." When the only choices are extremists that give one a headache, any candidate that can even be styled as a moderate or a compromiser is as the first breath of Spring to the cranky moderate legions of this country.

Regards--
Mary Anne