our political class has been multipolar…in our history the multipolar came from the various regions where the differences in viewpoints were stark.

Forieng policy. American foreign policy is ALMOST non partisan…at least it was until Bush the last came into power.

Most Americans differ in “tone” or “in accent” but not in theory from a middle viewpoint on foreign policy. Carter might have been some different from Ford but Carter didnt run into trouble until his foreign policy ideas had seemed to collapse.

Bush the last is a special case. Where his administration completly came unzipped is that he violated the two cardinal rules of foreign policy.

Shoot reasonable straight with the American people…and be fairly competent. Those rules bend sometimes but if you violate one you are in trouble and two you are toast.

Call it lying or exaggeration or whatever, it is clear that what was being claimed about Saddam and stated about Iraq’s future were “wrong”. Most Americans have come to a judgment that they were so wrong that a prudent person should ahve known that. And that is why Bush was booed at Obama’s inagural. The American people were just finished with him…he had left the center of American politics.

Robert G. Oler

Which brings me to where your questions really break down – the issue of foreign policy. Foreign policy and foreign policy issues, goes against the grain with those 2 questions.

What we are in desperate need of is to acknowledge that we live in a multi-polar country, and have a political class that represents this fact. ..

We have always live din a multi polar country since the founding of The Republic.

My two test do define the issues…the trick is to figure out where the issue is on the sliding scale.

For instance the right wing is losing the gay marriage debate…they just are. Over 55 people are oppossed to gay marriage, below that down to the 20’s the scale shifts dramatically. The right was once oppossed to equal rights for minorities…the scale shifts.

Robert G. Oler

I am sorry, but the idea of there being a center, and has been a center, is an out moded idea. Those 2 questions might define a philosophic point of view, as it relates to certain aspects of politics, but it does not, nor can it define all issues that need consideration.

What we are in desperate need of is to acknowledge that we live in a multi-polar country, and have a political class that represents this fact.

How to get it is an entirely different question

“The problem is that, I don’t believe anyone in this country can agree on what the center is”

Well most people think that, John McCain’s campaign staff did at least…but I disagree. I think that the center is fairly well understood; if one looks for it.

The problem is that one has to not look at a set of issues, but AT A MINDSET.

What is the journey of the American people is twofold 1)”We the people” is extended to more and more of the population (ie the people who have “rights” which we think of as baseline… gets extended more and more with each generation and 2) The American people expect more and more that “life” throughout America looks about the same everywhere.

If one can grasp those concepts then the “center” of American politics is easy to find. It takes awhile for the American people to come to a head on an issue, but at some point on almost every issue there is a consensus and it generally evolves around the two items I mention up front.

The problem in American politics today is that both parties are captives of their base that is small but active and is captive of litmus test issues which really mean little outside of the base. For instance the Dem base is sour on Iraq because they dont like Bush; they cannot remotly see the danger in a precipitous withdrawl (I dont like that we got there but we are there) they just are furious at how we got there. The GOP base is hung up on the social issues that fewer and fewer Americans agree with them…and the fact that they hate big government even while they embrace it.

An example of this is human spaceflight. The right wing which claims to love “industry” is also the biggest cheerleader for a government run program.

Of course a similar notion in health care is ghastly.

I agree that Obama is trying to govern from “the center” and we will see how that works out. Reagan moved as fast as he could to the center and was a successful President. Bush stayed on the right wing..and left hated by almost all Americans.

There is however a center in American politics.

Robert G. Oler

— Donald

However, it is hard to argue that the Republican party has moved, whatever has happened to the center, though I wouldn’t necessarily call it “to the right.” No one in Mr. Nixon’s party, let alone Mr. Lincoln’s, would recognize today’s Republicans obsessed with divisive social and religious issues and ideologically incapable of compromise, while today’s Democrats have compromised themselves further to the right than Democrats after FDR but otherwise are fairly straightforward ideological descendents of the “New Deal.”

While I do not like some of the resulting policies, I wish Mr. Obama every success in his attempts to re-find the center, but have very low expectations of success. Brining this discussion back to the issues at hand, I think this is an attitude we in the space community need to adapt. For example, while I think a human lunar base is essential to our future as a spacefaring species (as I argued last month in Space News), if my argument loses and the Administration selects “Flexible Path,” I would not fight that, only try to adapt parts of it to meet the deep space trade and commerce end-goals I think we should be working toward. Likewise, any of the other options, even “staying the course” with Dr. Griffin’s implementation of Constellation. If, every time a direction is chosen, we circle the wagons and shoot in, nothing whatsoever will be accomplished.

— Donald

its nuts…but it is a function of where both parties have been going…and I predict that it wont last much longer. Either one party will find the center driven there by coalitions and a leader like Reagan who/which will completly redefine the party (and no Sarah Palin is not it) and rule for a bit or we will find some strange coalitions start to form from the center, that bring in a center type effort. I find the later unlikely, the last time it happened was slavery bringing together what is now the GOP (although the GOP has gone so nutty I doubt Lincoln would recognize it)…

The problem is that, I don’t believe anyone in this country can agree on what the center is. I further submit that this has been true, for a while, but it really only became clear during the Bush administration. Due to a number of reasons, the political establishment, on both sides, started believing that this country is fairly right of center, when that wasn’t necessarily ever the case, and this allowed the idealogues to take over.

As for someone creating a coallition of the center – I’d argue that Obama may be trying to do that, given some of his stances (he is hardly a Bernie Sanders when it comes to a variety of policies), but this is made much more difficult because of the current state of the Republican party.

Well, I would kill to have HSF become “like roads,” at least as they were when the Highway and Freeway projects got started — projects that had no economic justification whatsoever at the time, but resulted from a vision (however simplistic it proved in retrospect) of a dramatic future.

Unfortunately, I find your last paragraph all too likely. We would not be the first society to spiral to ruin and eventual dark ages because we’d rather squabble over ideology and social irrelevancies than address our very real economic and technical problems — or, to use my earlier example, say “yes” to the opposition even when they are doing exactly what you want!

— Donald

Two points about your post.

The first is that human spaceflight is I agree something very small in our national politics and will remain thatway until it is “infiltrated” in our national politics by becoming a serious part of it. Human spaceflight should be like the roads or aviation or whatever…infrastructure related and seen as that. Right now it is seen as pork for a few congressional districts with no real value past the federal dollars spent…ie it is not seen by politicians as a “job creator” much past the jobs that the dollars create.

Outside the house in Santa Fe they are busily improving highway 646, turning it into a major road from a sleepy two laner. The jobs there take home a paycheck just as NASA jobs do, but I’ll bet you soup to donuts that ten years from now the spending is still creating jobs and wealth (at least we hope so we have been buying some land along the road!)

This cannot be said about any HSF spending yet…it is very concievable that every badly spent dime that the space station cost, if Obama or someone does the policy right; The Republic gets back later rather then sooner (and this is from someone who argued hard to kill the darn thing). And that is what I think is important about Obama and his group taking sometime to think this out.

The second point is your comment about Mark W and others.

I dont recall who said it on the Sunday talk shows but someone noticed that the Congress is heading more and more to a Parlimentary system where only the extremes of the party control the base. And I would add that this means groups who cannot on their own muster enough horsepower to control American political thought, do so in their own little pond.

The right and left wing of the country have gone so far off track it no longer matters what the other side does, they just oppose it because it is the other side. Frequently the arguments even change sides. IE when Bush the last was POTUS the right wing was all gung ho over the war deficit spending, but now that Obama is President deficit spending in all forms is bad. While the left that abhorred deficit spending on the war is all hooked up over another stimulus package even though it would drive the debt through any roof. The arguments are the same; on the right it was the war would pay for itself then when that didnt work it was eventually the spending will be worth it…Krugman is up with an op ed saying how we have to deficit spend for “the young people to have jobs” even though they are the ones who at my age will find their government crippled by it.

its nuts…but it is a function of where both parties have been going…and I predict that it wont last much longer. Either one party will find the center driven there by coalitions and a leader like Reagan who/which will completly redefine the party (and no Sarah Palin is not it) and rule for a bit or we will find some strange coalitions start to form from the center, that bring in a center type effort. I find the later unlikely, the last time it happened was slavery bringing together what is now the GOP (although the GOP has gone so nutty I doubt Lincoln would recognize it)…

but it is conceivable that the issue is going to be a federal government and its spending that has just gotten out of the realm of the two parties to control…that neither or both is able to break themselves from writing checks that some other generation has to pay.

Robert G. Oler