Obama's economic policies are on a collision course with the lessons of history: we get to look forward to four more years of seignorage accompanying by the mortgaging of our futures to the Chinese and Japanese, all with the hope that a massive misallocation of resources by the federal government (in favor of a lot of wasteful projects that are sexy to the starbucks crowd) will save us from the mess that they same behavior created.

While Bush just spent all of our money in mismanaging the Iraq war, expanding Section D of Medicare and expanding the dept of education massively, we now get to look forward to Obama spending close to a trillion dollars on Mob Museums and energy conservation gimmicks. Adam Smith is turning over in his grave so fast he may qualify as an alternative energy source under the stimulus! Same Sh*t, Different President.

The only good thing that may happen under Obama is that he may rethink excessive overseas commitments that we can no longer afford.

That may be bad news for polemicists like Frank; I suspect it will be very good news for the working people he says he cares about, but whose lives--both religious and economic--seem entirely foreign to him.

Leave the pseudo-anti-intellectualism to the movement conservatives. Frank can hang with the locals fine. Washington seems to be full of eggheads trying desperately not to look egghead, and accusing each other of being eggheads (while the worst eggheads in the worst tradition are never called on it. Even George Will does it, which is absurd. You should give it up.

Centrism is something of a cult here in Washington, D.C., and a more specious superstition you never saw. Its adherents pretend to worship at the altar of the great American middle, but in fact they stick closely to a very particular view of events regardless of what the public says it wants.
.
And through it all, centrism bills itself as the most transgressive sort of exercise imaginable. Its partisans are "New Democrats," "Radical Centrists," clear-eyed believers in a "Third Way." The red-hot tepids, we might call them -- the jellybeans of steel.
.
The reason centrism finds an enthusiastic audience in Washington, I think, is because it appeals naturally to the Beltway journalistic mindset, with its professional prohibition against coming down solidly on one side or the other of any question. Splitting the difference is a way of life in this cynical town. To hear politicians insist that it is also the way of the statesman, I suspect, gives journalists a secret thrill.
.
Yet what the Beltway centrist characteristically longs for is not so much to transcend politics but to close off debate on the grounds that he -- and the vast silent middle for which he stands -- knows beyond question what is to be done.

.
Thomas Frank apparently believes (like many of us) that the ideology of centrism has also failed as a set of principles by which successful governance can thrive. His issue is with the ideology of centrism, not ideological moderation (vs extremism). He points out that radical, extreme centrism has a history of failure (examples of which one can readily find examining the record of the Clinton presidency) that, while not as awful as the past eight years of reigning movement conservatism, will probably similarly fail to sufficiently correct the damage done by rightist rule.
.
I don't believe that you're so obtuse as to have completely missed Frank's point, which is not at all about the Clintons, which is not about moderation as opposed to extremism, and which is certainly not about polemicist ranting, Joe Klein.
.
But that leaves us with the impression that you're somehow unwilling to honestly tell the public where you stand. If you're not left or right, but center, then tell us so, Joe. Tell us that you're attacking Frank because he's attacking centrists --which means you.
.
Are you willing to honestly tell the public that you are or are not a proponent of the ideology of Centrism (for which Thomas Frank takes you to task personally in his observer article Joe Klein's Turnip Day), Joe Klein?

Tom @14, I think you nailed it.