I think the problem, if one to see it as that, is that most Americans want to keep the status quo, they just want to be on the winning side of the economic divide.  In other words, most Americans don't like radical change.  They may want the criminal bankers and stock brokers to be tossed in a jail cell, but they definitely don't want the government to nationalize the banks or to tear down the "free market" economy.

And when we discuss the personal wealth of candidates, I think one needs to always think about Senator Kerry.  He represents I think the notion that for some, and I stress some, politicians, to be independently wealthy does allow them to be more a statesman and less of fundraiser.  Moreover, the corruption of people like Delay was because through their political power they could be live like and next to the wealthy jet set people. 

This kind of Wall Street and establishment move for a candidate who is even more "centrist" than Obama tells me that the plutocracy is getting very nervous about the gathering rage over the grotesque inequalities, class divisions and networks of exploitation and usury that have been exposed to sunlight by the Great Recession.  The same thing is happening in Europe: old political coalitions based largely on cultural values are breaking down under socio-economic stresses.  The distinctions between debtor and creditor, employee and employer, rent-payer and rent-collector are now becoming much more important than they were a decade ago, and whether one culturally affiliates with traditionalist Christian Democrats or liberal secular Social Democrats is somewhat less important.  The politics of Europe and the United States are being turned, for now, into a savage 19th century battle waged by creditors and employers to make sure that, above all else, society's owners are paid back by the people who are in hock to them, and that employees aren't able to organize sufficiently well to demand larger redistributed pieces of the pie.  Nominally "socialist" parties are working openly with bankers in Europe to enforce financial contracts and protect financial assets from the potential contagion of a brewing borrowers' rebellion.  Unemployment on both sides of the Atlantic is being kept very high intentionally to reduce the bargaining power of employees, subordinate them to effective social control, keep them at each others' throats politically, and maintain downward pressure on wages to protect the lifestyles of those who purchase luxury consumption goods in part with the income garnered from interest rents collected from the same stressed workers whose labor is being exploited.

People like Friedman and his privileged friends, desperate to hold onto their ridiculously inflated social and economic positions and incomes in a dynamically changing world, can no longer trust the existing parties, whose ranks are swelling with angry ordinary people experiencing various forms and degrees of resentment.   The privileged and the money managers want a party that can be trusted, above all else, to protect their assets from the madding rabble, and protect their cultural privileges from the roiling cultural populism that is changing America across the spectrum.  They can't count on Barack Obama to make good on his promise to protect them forever from the people with pitchforks, because the cross-class coalition within Obama's own Democratic party is unraveling as people begin to look to shore up their material interests in response to economic stresses and threats.  At the same time, the Republican coalition is also in danger of unraveling along class lines.  If the populist elements of the "Tea Party" break from the country club and board room set, the anti-Wall Street populist resentment that characterizes some elements of Tea Party thought will no longer be checked and controlled by the needs of coalition politics.  Some Tea Partiers might become less susceptible to the basic race-and-nation Republican message that they should work hand-in-hand with plutocrats to protect their common white turf from transfer payments to black and brown people.  Eventually it might get through to them that they are being fleeced more on an average day by a scheming financial sector than they are in a year by all of those welfare mothers.

Eventually, we might see some of the people who are funding this new radical centrism going to jail for their criminal fleecing of their own customers and social network co-denizens.  I'm sure Bernie Madoff would be lining up to contribute if he weren't in jail already.  No wonder the money guys are racing to enlist establishment mouthpieces like Friedman to build a new barricade around their stuff.

Much contemporary prosperity is based on exploitation and the preservation of a brutal and degrading system of hard work for meager returns, organized by corporations run on an authoritarian and hierarchical model.  Friedman thinks the guys who mine the resources that go into the gadgets he uses, and assemble the shoes and clothes he wears, are spoiled and overpaid - if they are Americans at least - and that their wages need to fall until they are more in line with the typical Chinese or Indian flat-worlder who keeps Tom Friedman in the lifestyle to which he has become accustomed.  But I suspect Friedman can feel the future breathing down his neck, and it terrifies him.  A world in which informed opinion is a dime-a-dozen, and freely available all over the internet, isn't a world in which routine scribblers like Thomas Friedman and Richard Cohen will be able to continue to rake in hefty salaries and speaking fees from a dying cultural establishment erecting doomed monopoly barriers around its cultural citadels.

Excellent post, destor.

On many critical issues there is neither a "centrist" public constituency, or policy position, that makes any sense if what our country needs out of public policy is solutions to, or at least mitigation of, actual, real world problems.  

What is the "centrist" position on carbon emissions reduction?  One side says we have to do it, now.  The other says we don't have to do it.  So the "centrist" says...what?  We should maybe think about it more?  Maybe forget about it for awhile, and hope the question will resolve itself?

What is the "centrist" position on austerity vs. stimulus as a better bet to create jobs and get the economy going?

What is the "centrist" position on whether we need further financial reform, or whether Dodd-Frank will do the job?

What is the "centrist" position on labor unions and labor law reform?

What is the "centrist" position on whether we need to a) drown government in the bathtub or b) acknowledge that a government of roughly the size we have, not capable of being drowned in anyone's bathtub, capable of being paid for over the long run, pursuing different policies in a number of areas, is required if we are to have a chance of a functional society in the world of today? 

Is the "centrist" position on HC reform what we got (because it represents the "center" position among elected officials in Washington at that time, defined as what the 40th Senator will not kill by supporting a filibuster)?  Or a public option plan?  According to public opinion, it would be the latter.  So whose "centrism" are we talking about?  There is a major disconnect between what people outside Washington say they care about and want addressed, and what federal policy debates at the moment are even about.  Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have done recent work backing this up empirically, among others. 

AT wrote the other day that a great many Americans are attracted to the idea of "moderation"--which is often, I believe, incorrectly conflated with "centrism".  That's true.  But, it begs the question of how one defines "moderation".  If  "moderation" is defined conventionally as somewhere "between" two conventionally asserted [by whom?  Who gets to define what counts as "extreme"?  That question rarely seems to be asked.  The GOP and the Right define, and succeed in defining even in the heads of some Democrats, as "extreme left" positions that majorities of the public actually say they support.  So who is "extreme" in such instances?] "extremes", where exactly between those two "extremes" lies "moderation"?  Where is the dividing line between an "extreme" position vs. a "moderate" position?  Are all potential positions classifiable according to a binary categorization, in which they are either "moderate" or "extreme"? 

That whole construct and way of thinking about politics, which dominates political discussion in this country and appears to be uncritically accepted by many, can-- depending on what the specific problems a society is faced with at a particular time in its history--be both incoherent and dysfunctional in my view.  

Sometimes in a specific historical context the big issues of the day lend themselves better to the construction of a "vital center" (to use Schlesinger's phrase and of course he wrote a book by that title a long time ago that seemed to come back into fashion somewhat in recent years), meaning by "vital" one that serves the country well and commands substantial and reasonably durable public support. 

Not today's big issues, not most of them.  For better or for worse.  Actually I think there could be a "vital center" today.  It just isn't anywhere near where today's 40th sitting Senator happens to be on the big issues of our day. 

Destor,  Thomas Friedman is a very special, case the question always is, how could somebody who continuously says so many dumb things can have such a cool career? George W. Bush at least had the excuse that his family had money and fantastic connection. I suppose it says more about the people who pay Friedman and read him than about Friedman himself... He should worry, if it works for him, he'd be a fool not to stick with it.... However, if I were you, I wouldn't waste my time and talent trying to figure out some inner logic in his drivel.

Having said that, I think Bloomberg might make a good president, especially because he is Jewish. I very much like the principled and evenhanded way he navigated the Ground-Zero mosque business. I get the feeling that only a Jewish president of the USA could whip the Israelis into line and if some POTUS doesn't man up and finally do, it will mean disaster for both the USA and Israel too.