Marshall Wittman, in a long meditation on whether bloggers are necessary, makes some obvious points, some important points, and a couple very strange points. Of the obvious ones, of course bloggers aren't necessary, this country somehow survived in the years before Markos Moulitsas (otherwise known as The Dark Days). The real question is whether bloggers are a force for good, and here he tries to offer an answer, but again gets mired in his traditional swamp of reflexive anti-partisanship. And this is what I find so infuriating about Wittman: an obvious bright guy with a keen ear for the quick phrase, his ideology is a strange, reflexive beast, blindly groping through the grooves between Republicans and Democrats with no clear conception of where it actually wants to go:
The Moose's fixation is the creation of a "third force' in politics that transcends the petty partisan divide. That is why he is enamored with a wide range of leaders who follow in the footsteps of his favorite posthumous pol - T.R. [...]
Fortunately, there is a growing group of bloggers from the vital center - or "immoderate centrists" is the label the Moose prefers. The Moose gives credit to Joe Gandelman over at the Moderate Voice and the folks at Centerfield for promoting centrist voices in the blogosphere.
I like Teddy too, but for his environmentalism, his antitrust work, his populism, his empiricism, his distaste for racism and belief in the universal potential for improvement. And, in some respects, I don't like Teddy, namely for his glorification of belligerent masculinity and the unnecessarily aggressive foreign policy he followed. But Teddy's carefree willingness to bash through party walls and form new alliances was little more than a sideshow -- who cares? The Republicans are still around, the Bull Moosers aren't.
What frustrates me about Wittman is that he's infatuated with centrism for the sake of centrism. He doesn't offer an ideology with greater coherence than the splintered philosophies pushed by the major parties. You'll occasionally watch him justify some international aggressiveness or domestic spending on the basis of its assumed popularity, but never on its merit as policy. He wants a third way, but so far as I can tell, all he's interested in is the building of the road, not where it goes. It's a hollowness that lends itself to bizarre posts like this:
