“The centrist bloc in the Senate would have the same kind of power as Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court—the swing vote on everything that matters,” writes Wheelan, a senior lecturer and policy fellow at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences and a senior lecturer in the Department of Economics. “They would also be pragmatic bridge builders willing to work with either party on issues that intersect with centrist priorities (e.g., fix entitlements with the Republicans; do something about climate change with the Democrats).”
There is now an organization to support this idea, the Centrist Project, and a political action committee dedicating to supporting moderate U.S. Senate candidates, he writes.
After a year of “trying to empower the political middle,” says Wheelan: “I’m not going to lie; it’s a slog.”
Read the full opinion piece, published 5/23/14 by U.S. News & World Report.
